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The American Prospect - articles by authorenCondemned Lovehttps://prospect.org/article/condemned-love
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<p><em>Amour</em>, featuring Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">D</span>on’t be fooled by the possibility of a kinder, gentler Michael Haneke. It would be easy to let down your guard given the title of his latest, gruelingly good film, <em>Amour</em>, and the release poster’s image of a beautiful, aging woman’s face cupped by loving hands. But Haneke has made a decades-long career out of crafting haute horror stories, and old habits die hard. As do the habits of <em>Amour</em>’s octogenarian couple, struggling to hold on to routines as if that could stave off the inexorability of death. </p>
<p>Set almost entirely within the confines of the pair’s Paris apartment, Haneke’s latest Cannes-winning film centers on Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) as she confronts her slow demise from stroke and dementia and her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) accepts the crushing task of serving as her caregiver. </p>
<p>Haneke’s films are a tough haul—icy in their austerity and remove, fueled on expertly modulated tension and dread. And yet for anyone who likes their films served cold à la Stanley Kubrick or David Cronenberg, Haneke is irresistible. You stagger out of each one mopping the sweat off your brow, which helps cover the residual embarrassment over screaming out loud in that one scene. But no matter what punishment he metes out, in a few years’ time, you find yourself running to see his next variation on the theme of “no exit.” <em>Amour</em> is one of his finest, with a premise that is pure Haneke. Two people trapped in their home, fighting a battle they’ve already lost—he’s always played with notions of choice and control, and sets up his films like exquisite experiments to see how his test subjects react to having neither choice nor control. Plot exists only in service of provoking and revealing character: What will they do? What would you do? </p>
<p>A master at creating claustrophobic atmosphere, Haneke takes particular delight in filming families under siege. They’re either curdling from within (as in <em>The Seventh Continent</em>, focused on a family suicide pact) or under attack from without, with assailants including jovial murderers in tennis whites (<em>Funny Games</em>), and whoever is delivering grainy surveillance-style videotapes of a family’s daily activities to their doorstep (<em>Caché</em>). His audiences fare little better; Haneke both taunts and titillates viewers, and turns us into queasy accomplices by dint of our voyeurism. “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely,” Haneke <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/magazine/23haneke-t.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">told</a> <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> in a fascinating profile. “All movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”</p>
<p>With that, <em>Amour</em> opens with the usual slap in the face. Firefighters batter down a door to find a dead woman laid out on the bed like an elderly Ophelia, flowers wreathing her face, her mouth a long grey stitch. <span class="pullquote">By starting with the dénouement, one might think Haneke has scrambled any sense of suspense. Quite the contrary—we will sit frozen for the next several hours with clammy hands and a rising sense of dread.</span> There is little worse than waiting, powerlessly, for the inevitable. </p>
<p>Great films about old age are often cast in soft, sepia tones of regret—see Ingmar Bergman’s <em>Wild Strawberries</em>, Yasujiro Ozu’s <em>Tokyo Story</em>, and the too-infrequently seen masterpiece that was the inspiration for Ozu’s film, Leo McCarey’s <em>Make Way for Tomorrow</em>. Haneke’s film is a flintier thing, but no less powerful in its emotional impact, perhaps because <em>Amour</em> is an unusually personal work for Haneke—an homage to the director’s elderly aunt, who suffered from agonizing rheumatism and begged her nephew to help her end her own life. Haneke refused, and then rushed her to the hospital after her first failed suicide attempt; on her second, two years later, she succeeded. </p>
<p>Haneke has always been obsessed with the human cost and context of any given death or act of violence. What exactly have we lost? He lays it out in swift strokes. After the film’s brutal overture, Haneke cuts back in time to follow Anne and George coming back from a concert. Retired music teachers, they are the cultured, bourgeois sort the director most loves to toy with, so it’s no surprise when they discover someone has attempted to break into their house. The audience shudders through a frisson of fear—not only are Georges and Anne the prototypical Haneke mark, but the incident echoes that first home invasion and the meticulously arranged corpse on the bed. Georges is initially alarmed, Anne less so, and, unburdened by the cruelties of dramatic irony, they leave behind the incident and go to bed. The next morning, over breakfast, Anne suddenly freezes, her face blank and unresponsive to Georges’ entreaties. Something has clearly gone wrong, but Haneke doesn’t reveal what, exactly, until later—he keeps us fixed inside the disorienting moment with Georges as he stares into a familiar face gone suddenly, completely strange. It’s a measure of the couple’s years of cozy intimacy together that, after an initial panic, Georges thinks she is playing a prank on him—why else would she fail to respond the way she always has?</p>
<p>This uncanny scene reveals the intruder into Georges and Anne’s lives is an existential one, nothing less than time itself. And in casting two greats of French New Wave cinema, Haneke amplifies that sense by tapping into both their formidable talents, and audiences’ memories of their lush and beautiful youth. Riva delivers an amazingly physical performance as Anne loses movement, language, and memory and Tritignant traces a parallel emotional trajectory from compassion and fatigue to terror and rage. Alongside these performances are echoes of Riva’s most well-known role in <em>Hiroshima, Mon Amour</em>, an actress whose Japanese lover tells her, “You are not endowed with memory.” And Tritignant brings images of his widower in <em>A Man and A Woman</em>, struggling to move out of the past. The actors’ own histories turn up the sound on what Anne and Georges are losing—along the death march, Haneke lets us glimpse Anne’s radiance and charm, Georges’s moody sensitivity and kindness. </p>
<p>Anne and Georges are not alone, ostensibly. Isabelle Huppert (formerly the torturing and tortured protagonist of Haneke’s <em>The Piano Teacher</em>) bursts in several times as the couple’s daughter, worn down by her own troubles and too frayed to be of much help to her parents. And there are nurses, but eventually, Georges dismisses them, and the film descends into a dark pas de deux. Even the act of helping Anne out of her wheelchair becomes a fraught embrace—from the first dance at a wedding, so too this last one in the cold of old age. </p>
<p>Haneke’s dispassionate eye captures it all. The static camera, impeccable composition, and lack of incidental music provides a framework that mirrors Anne’s own fortitude in the beginning and supports the emotional ferocity of the film towards the end. The word “dignity” is not uttered, but the film seems preoccupied with it—this concept central to so many moral and ethical debates, and defined by none of them. Georges comes home from a funeral to find Anne out of her wheelchair, sitting on the floor by an open window. “Forgive me,” she says of her failed suicide attempt with love, sadness, and a shocking politeness. “I was too slow.” </p>
<p>Late in the film, Georges tries to stop his daughter from seeing Anne. “None of all that deserves to be shown,” he says. An interesting line given the camera’s unblinking gaze on Anne and George’s disintegration—and given what it refuses to show viewers. Who is playing that music? Who turned off the water? What is Anne saying as she goes around the corner? Things are always happening beyond the frame, and in the picture are things we’d rather not see. </p>
<p>Haneke is a provocateur, but a profoundly moral one. This time, though, we aren’t being confronted by a buried secret of injustice, or with Hollywood’s attitude towards violence, or with the ethical rot of a village before the Nazi years. Haneke makes complex films, but they aren’t always subtle ones, and his critiques of violence have been faulted for attempting to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. But with this, he may have made his best horror story yet, because for many, what is death but a horror, and love our only thin, fallible armor against it? As Haneke reminds us from the very beginning, our demise is a forgone conclusion. What else is there to do but live and love anyway? </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:03:06 +0000216340 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewThis Is Not a Movie Reviewhttps://prospect.org/article/not-movie-review
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Director Jafar Panahi appears on screen for almost the entire duration of his latest film—making breakfast, getting bad news from his lawyer, staging an impromptu read-through of a script the Iranian government has forbidden him to shoot. Panahi is not directing, though—at least he’s not supposed to be. As his cameraman and collaborator reminds him, even yelling “cut” would be considered an offense. The resulting footage is just as ontologically coy. The feature, which makes its U.S. debut this week, is titled <em>This Is Not a Film</em>.</p>
<p>Like the René Magritte painting it <a href="http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.thisIsNotaPipe.en.html">calls upon</a>, Panahi and collaborator Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s “effort,” as it’s billed, draws attention to the slippery line between artifice and actuality. In this way, Panahi keeps true to his usual M.O.—the hall-of-mirrors style for which he and his mentor, the great Abbas Kiarostami (<em>Certified Copy</em>,<em> Ten</em>, <em>Taste of Cherry</em>), are renowned. What’s real, what’s not, what’s staged, and what’s spontaneous is never quite clear in these directors’ films. As Kiarostami has said, “We can never get close to the truth except through lying."</p>
<p>The lie in the film’s title gets at the truth behind its inception. In 2010, Panahi became an international cause célèbre after the Iranian government convicted him and colleague Mohammad Rasoulof of conspiring "to commit crimes against the country's national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." Panahi and Rasoulof had been working on a feature focusing on the events surrounding the contested 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which sparked mass protests in support of the opposition Green Party. Partway through shooting that film, Panahi and Rasoulof were arrested in Panahi’s apartment, their footage seized, and both filmmakers were sentenced to six years in prison with a 20-year ban on writing screenplays, leaving the country, speaking to foreign press, and making films. They were released to house arrest pending appeal, time that Panahi used to create <em>This Is Not a Film.</em></p>
<p>The Iranian government has only itself to blame for Panahi’s latest bit of intransigence. What else could happen when you tell an incorrigible director—especially one unafraid to take on sexism and misogyny (<em>The Circle</em>) and socioeconomic inequality (<em>Crimson Gold</em>)—that he can’t make films anymore? Shot on an iPhone and a digital camera wielded by Mirtahmasb, the film was smuggled into France for consideration at Cannes last year on a USB stick concealed in a cake. Some months later, authorities arrested Mirtahmasb at the airport in Tehran, preventing him from attending the film’s release in France and its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. He and six other Iranian filmmakers were subsequently charged with “collaborating with the Persian BBC” and jailed for three months in Evin Prison.</p>
<p>“Take a shot of me in case I’m arrested,” jokes a prescient Mirtahmasb in <em>This Is Not a Film</em>. “At least there’ll be some images left.”</p>
<p>For high drama, the film can’t beat its own backstory. Shot almost entirely inside Panahi’s apartment, <em>This Is Not a Film</em> documents small-scale moments: the director gazing off his balcony, mulling his past work; attempting an unexpectedly funny and tender rapprochement with his daughter’s gigantic iguana, Igi. Yet the film’s formal limitations—and resulting artistic ingenuity—only underscore its emotional impact, particularly when Panahi attempts to block out scenes from his latest screenplay. The script centers on a young woman who has gained admission to an art institute but is locked in her room by her conservative parents to keep her from enrolling. While Panahi isn’t allowed to direct, he and Mirtahmasb slyly note that the authorities didn’t say anything about acting. Ever alert to when allegory tips into irony, Panahi “stars” as the girl, moving about in a tape-demarcated space that seems half stage set and half prison cell.</p>
<p>This doesn’t satisfy Panahi in the slightest, though, and he says to Mirtahmasb, “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?” He pulls up different pivotal scenes from his films, each of them capturing a moment where his nonprofessional actors (a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia was cast in the central role in <em>Crimson Gold</em>, a defiant little girl in <em>The Mirro</em>r) take over a scene or abandon the film entirely, or when the location of his shoot seems to direct the scene. For a filmmaker like Panahi, it becomes clear that making films is not so much about directing action as it is about embracing unpredictability, surprise, and serendipity. Panahi, unlike the government officials who have attempted to cage him, is continually seeking out his actors’ resistance, trying to foment his own authorial overthrow.</p>
<p>Despite working without a set, a screenplay, real actors, or access to film, Panahi and Mirtahmasb have made a very Panahi-esque work—uncompromisingly political and marked by the deliberate unsettling of narrative and directorial structure in favor of the possibility of being unseated by the unexpected. As with <em>The Mirror</em>, which takes a sharp left when its child actor screeches that she doesn’t want to act anymore and decides to head home, this latest work is strongly Brechtian in its insistence on revealing the method of its production—the director continually onscreen, the direct address, the artifice of its staging. Panahi is a feature filmmaker, Mirtahmasb a documentarian, and this film is a curious hybrid of both directors’ genres, purporting to be shot in a day even though time markers indicate otherwise, and continually interrupted by surprises that are so perfect they seem plotted. As in Panahi’s <em>Offside</em>, a film ostensibly about soccer that shows no soccer at all, <em>This Is Not a Film</em> deploys its fair share of narrative frustration when the recounting of the director’s original arrest is continually interrupted and never completed. But most notably, the film is still fueled by Panahi’s enthrallment to the vagaries of people, place, and even pets. Igi the iguana and a neighbor’s yapping dog Mickey are the undirectable variables, the lizard clambering over bookcases, couches, and even Panahi himself (“Igi, your nails are too sharp!”) and the unwelcome dog unleashing fits of barking that drown out dialogue.</p>
<p>The film’s final minutes come alive when a university student happens to come by to collect trash. (Or is the interruption staged? It’s seems too good to be unscripted, but as with much of this film, questions of artifice become irrelevant.) A grad student in arts research, he’s a friendly and photogenic fellow, and Panahi’s excitement at having a real subject to interview and film is obvious. They ride the elevator together, chatting about the building’s tenants, how to survive while finishing a dead-end degree, and, in a truncated fashion, Panahi’s plight. The footage captures pops and crackles from the street outside the building. It’s the Persian New Year, and young people are setting off fireworks despite the government ban on “pagan” celebrations. The streets are livid with bonfires, and the film’s last images capture the irrepressible hope, fury, and sense of peril behind Iran’s Green Revolution and Panahi’s own filmic revolt. This is not a film. It unreels like real life and, perhaps, a future foretold.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:38:48 +0000210517 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewIt All Falls Aparthttps://prospect.org/article/it-all-falls-apart
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="dropcap">W</span>ho are you to judge? Another’s life, the beliefs and attachments, rational and otherwise, that make up another’s choices—how can anyone evaluate such things? Yet the arguing Iranian couple in <em>A Separation</em> demand judgment. They face the camera in the opening scene, a comely woman with dyed-red hair under her veil, and her bearded, exasperated husband. Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) are presenting their case for divorce to an unseen magistrate and in turn, to us. She seeks a better life for their daughter abroad; he refuses to leave behind his home and his elderly father, who is stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. The judge denies them a divorce, declaring, “My finding is that your problem is a small problem.” They are stuck with each other and with us.</p>
<p>These are the seemingly low stakes of Asghar Farhadi’s latest, which has the unlikely distinction of being an Iranian film with Oscar buzz. (Iran hasn’t had a nomination since Majid Majidi’s <em>Children of Heaven</em> was up for best foreign-language film in 1998.) Bolstered by the power of its performances and an impeccably modulated script, <em>A Separation</em> is a grim, beautiful thing, as many Iranian films are. The film is also a dense piece of formalism, like a Farsi-language version of Michael Haneke’s great <em>Caché</em>, with a similar focus on hypocrisy and social and generational tensions. <em>A Separation</em> lacks the usual enjoyable yet tricky tropes popular with Iranian art-house darlings like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf—there are no film-within-a-film shenanigans, documentary/verité slippage, not a stitch of meta or irony or meta-irony to be found. There’s none of the room those techniques afford to step outside of this film’s world, one where even offhand remarks lead to drastic consequences, lies, and moral compromises. The film is a domestic drama crossed with a legal procedural, all of it so tightly wound that it seems staged inside a tinderbox. The hall of justice is a dirty room; its judge, an irritable guy sipping tea, and that, too, is part of the cruelty of the system—that such mundaneness could shoot down each attempt to do the right thing and render each action a gamble in which the house always wins.</p>
<p>Unhappy stuff. And with relations between Iran and the West worsening every day, it’d be tempting to search the country’s film for sociological insight or signs of political cant. <em>A Separation</em> offers a degree of the first in its depiction of the deeply religious couple who become enmeshed with the secular, cosmopolitan Simin and Nader, who hires the devout Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to care for his father. Our carrot-and-stick foreign policy toward Iran—support of the country’s young protesters; sanctions and threats against the mullahs—has little consideration for people like this chador-garbed woman and her volatile husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), an unemployed shoemaker hounded by creditors. They place a higher premium on faith and honor than on any notion of inherent rights but chafe under economic desperation just the same—and what is a black-and-white policy to do with that?</p>
<p>Thankfully, <em>A Separation</em> presents all those nuances and separations between class, gender, religion, and age—but manages to avoid both the Iranians Are People, Too schematics and political polemics. Farhadi’s film uses its prowling intelligence to insist always on the mess. There’s the mess of that in the <em>medias res</em> opening, the mess Razieh wants to avoid when she calls a religious hotline to see if she can change her charge’s soiled trousers, and the unavoidable, existential mess of living intertwined with people with whom you may violently disagree.</p>
<p>That last is typical for an Iranian film, most of which should be titled <em>There Will Be Shouting</em>. Why talk when you can start off with frayed politesse, slowly add more and more frantic hand gestures, and then crescendo into a full-blown howl of nagging, stonewalling, attacks on God, and standing over and screaming down directly onto the pate of your arbiter? The system, as with most unfair things, forces its subjects to prove who is more tireless or has more money in their pockets. After they run afoul of each other, Razieh and Hodjat resort to the former; Simin and Nader, to the latter. Yet even within the couples, there are schisms. Farhadi is impatient with the institutionalized sexism that the women must endure as their men fight battles over empiricism and honor. The women are trapped in a cramped faith and magical thinking about money. The ones with the cleanest hands are the children of each of the couples—two girls with the knowing gazes of those with a surfeit of intelligence and a lack of societal power. They trade a look near the end, right before the adults implode, that says, “Is this for real?” It is, sadly, and Farhadi’s harshest indictment of all is that this coming-of-age story should be such a disillusioning one.</p>
<p><em>A Separation</em> ends a beat too soon for those who like plot resolution. Near the end of the film, Simin is bargaining with Razieh and asks her adversary, “What do <em>we </em>have to do with all this?” Farhadi’s insistent answer would be: everything. The adults wait, exhausted, on opposite sides of doorways for a decision that will bring no resolution and a justice that will never come. The film makes its point devastatingly clear: Despite our estrangement, there is no escape from each other—and realizing that is the only way out.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:06:30 +0000209435 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewMore Like Tinhttps://prospect.org/article/more-tin
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<p><span class="dropcap">C</span>all it the Meryl Streep money shot, the scene most likely to appear in the Oscar montage for best actress. Margaret Thatcher sits in a patient’s paper gown, grasping for her wits through a fog of Alzheimer’s, aware she must perform a charade of competency. A young doctor peppers her with questions about whether she’s experiencing hallucinations and how she's feeling. And just like that, the anxious old woman transforms, replaced by a former U.K. prime minister who draws herself up, fixes her opponent with a glare, and issues a flinty indictment about the tyranny of modern life, dominated by those who “care more about feelings than thoughts and ideas.”</p>
<p>The irony is that the much-anticipated <em>The Iron Lady</em> hews precisely to this formula. Long on sentiment but short on statement, the film is a star vehicle for Streep, who does her usual, impeccable job of conjuring flesh and blood out of a stale script. This time she’s channeling director Phyllida Lloyd’s take on Thatcher as a grocer’s daughter who battled stuffed-shirt sexism to become one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in the world. Lloyd catches her subject on the downswing, however, recounting the story of Thatcher’s reign through a series of senility-induced flashbacks. By telling this story from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator, Lloyd presents a more intimate than iconic portrait of Thatcher—a small-screen lady Lear on the heath. As Thatcher is still alive, some of her supporters have looked askance at the film’s alleged insensitivity and invasion of privacy. Thatcher herself might have protested this treatment as well, but for different reasons. It seems unlikely that the powerhouse who shredded Britain’s post-war social-democratic contract, sacked scores of ministers, and went to war with “the enemy without” (the Argentinian junta over the Falklands) and “the enemy within” (striking miners at home) would prefer a profile more focused on Thatcher than Thatcherism, particularly if that portrait failed to reveal her relevance today.</p>
<p>With her embrace of free-market ideology, dismantling of public services and union power, and the sugar frosting/steel cake mien conservatives seem to favor in female politicians, Thatcher has <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/06/30/former_british_prime_minister_margaret_thatcher_emerges_as_the_n.html">become</a> a Tea Party darling. More than any conservative before her, she understood that Britain’s social order was ripe for a fall—that the individualism of the 1960s could be yoked to a desire for upward mobility that would disrupt the country’s class and political affiliations. With the Housing Act of 1980, she granted millions of working-class families the right to buy their government-subsidized homes—and wooed them away from their Labour party stronghold. True, Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter, but her father, Alfred Roberts, was also the mayor of Grantham, and his politically savvy daughter tapped into the middle-class’s distaste for those who relied on handouts—government-granted or unearned inheritances alike—and turned it into in-your-face populism.</p>
<p>But Thatcher’s reign also provides a fair warning for our times. In her early years, she went after inflation rather than unemployment, cutting government spending and raising interest rates—a move that sent England down the road to recession. Unemployment doubled to three million, sparking riots, blackouts, and strikes that left garbage filling the streets. Thatcher, however, had implemented the recommendations of a government committee that called for a dramatic raise in police salaries—up to 45 percent in some cases—along with an increase in their recruitment, so she was ready to put a harsh end to the unrest.</p>
<p>Shortly thereafter, the Falkland War both bloodied and bailed her out, leaving Thatcher well-primed to whack the next challenge to her power: the miners’ union that had helped bring down her predecessor, Edward Heath, with a crippling strike in 1974. She’d stockpiled coal and used MI5 to infiltrate miners’ groups before she fired a shot over the bow—a proposal to close down 20 pits employing some 20,000 workers, a move that sent the miners into a doomed strike. After a year of brinkmanship, Thatcher broke the trade unions’ backs, and with a slash in public services, the fortunes of much of northern England, Scotland, and Wales. Inflation soared again and many who had bought their council homes found them repossessed. Her attempt to implement a poll tax sparked riots, and finally a ministerial mutiny that forced her exit from 10 Downing Street.</p>
<p>High drama, but one wouldn’t know it from <em>The Iron Lady</em>, which plays like a domestic weepie spliced together with a historical clip reel. The film is so interior as to be hermetic, with criticisms of Thatcher’s policies stuffed into two unenlightening tropes—either some angry mullet foaming and barking outside her limo window or the viperous hissing of "grocer’s daughter" by the public-school boys turned MPs. And for all of its urge to plumb the depths of the person behind the politician, <em>The Iron Lady</em> doesn’t even tap into some of the richest veins—how Thatcher’s muscular English nationalism fit in with her sexual allure (yes, you read that right), how she married a girls-are-better-than-boys playground rhetoric with staunch individualism, why she felt consensus was for Quislings. For a film set in a character’s autumnal years, a period often imbued with regret and reckoning, there’s little mention of Thatcher’s legacy of privatization, deregulation, and recalibration of the left far to the right of where it had been.</p>
<p><em>The Iron Lady</em> could have forced Yank viewers to replace their outmoded ideas of Thatcher as all helmet hair, British teeth, and shoulder pads. Popular U.K. puppet-satire show “Spitting Image” dressed her as a dominatrix, as did Barney’s window decorator Simon Doonan. Francois Mitterand said she had the “eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” As Julian Barnes wrote, “If the House of Commons, with its incessant background noise, its schoolboy rowdiness, its dominant maleness, and its low level of repartée, often resembles nothing so much as the canteen in a minor public school, then Mrs. Thatcher is cast as Matron”—a role she obviously relished when she told Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at a 1981 economic summit meeting to “stop acting like a naughty schoolboy” and spanked Christopher Hitchens with a rolled-up parliamentary order. (That last is simply too good—<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/06/hitchens-201006?currentPage=4">scroll down to “Naughty Maggie” for a read</a>.) For the manky male political id, Thatcher’s dominance triggered both terror and desire, and therein underlay the sense of political anxiety, guilt, and relief at her ouster—“It was like killing your mother,” said one British colleague.</p>
<p>Thatcher was certainly canny at using the rhetoric of good housekeeping and women’s superiority to back her points, uttering such bon mots as “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman,” even as she declared that she owed nothing to women’s liberation. Thatcher’s derogatory views on identity politics are in keeping with her fetishization of the exceptional, entrepreneurial individual—after all, by boot-strapping herself into power she provided a template for a whole nation and a role for herself as the schoolmarm who would beat you with her Yes, You Can stick. Not surprisingly, she had little time for the snoozy political consensus nor the social-welfare safety net that preceded her, and worked at dismantling its geopolitical equivalent with her early embrace of Mikhail Gorbachev. For Thatcher, the free market was the future. “There is no alternative,” she famously declared, then sought to make it so. Now that the House That Thatcher Built (and New Labour helped renovate) is crumbling, there is no clear way forward … and riots reminiscent of Thatcher’s early years just behind.</p>
<p>This is the story Meryl Streep deserved to sink her horsey prosthetic choppers into, but that grande dame seems doomed to put her shine into nickel-plated settings. A pity, as this could have been a film—not just a role—of real relevance. Thatcher galvanized political dialogue, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/magazine/riff-the-iron-lady-as-anti-muse.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=1">fueled</a> a renaissance of cultural discontent, and left behind a legacy of drastic change and increased social mobility—both upward and downward. Much of our current moment was born from her reign; it is no time to be lost, like <em>The Iron Lady</em>’s Thatcher, in a fog of forgetting, regret, and recrimination.</p>
<p><em>Many thanks to my colleagues Alexis Buisson and Kung Li for their insights, and particularly to Arun Kundnani for his trenchant analysis of the Thatcher years. </em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:28:20 +0000209149 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewBeautiful Annihilationhttps://prospect.org/article/beautiful-annihilation
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<div class="field-item even"> Christian Genisnaes</div>
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<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>s Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier would have it, there is little more maddening than a depressive in one’s care. The lachrymose lump under the covers, the dead-eyed gaze at dawn, the obstinacy—almost pleasurable, it can seem—in clinging to suffering. Nothing is worse than taking care of such a person, perhaps, except being the depressive herself, lost in a scratchy fog of sadness and anxiety punctuated only by guilt and the unanswerable, unrelenting question: Why can’t you be happy?</p>
<p>Von Trier’s response: Because the world is coming to an end. In <i>Melancholia</i>, the director has made his version of a zombie apocalypse film, with Kirsten Dunst as the living dead. I don't mean to be flippant, really, as the thing is deadly serious when it’s not pitched for perverse laughs—an operatic three-parter that focuses on two sisters as they grapple with the end of the world.</p>
<p>The film is stunning—if you go in for the director’s brand of cinematic sadomasochism. Reviled for what many perceive to be a misogynistic bent, von Trier puts his female characters through the wringer, be it by burnishing their sainthood through sexual degradation (<i>Breaking the Waves</i>), condemning them to an unjust death (<i>Dancer in the Dark</i>), or banishing them to a Fury’s madness (<i>Antichrist</i>). It’s easy to miss the possibility that von Trier is depicting his own well-documented breakdown and lifelong struggles with depression, from which he has only started to emerge. Audiences are more likely distracted by his enfant-terrible utterances (see the <a href="http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201110/lars-von-trier-gq-interview-october-2011?currentPage=1">Nazi-inflected ramblings</a> that got him censured at Cannes) and his cruel treatment of actors and audiences alike. <i>Melancholia</i> is no exception to von Trier’s sadistic rule. Even though there’s no blood rage or shrieking this time, the director clearly found another way to channel his own anguish when he cast Dunst, frighteningly good in this role, as Justine, the prophet of doom.</p>
<p>Auteurist explanations aside, von Trier’s latest is a masterwork—the notoriously inexpressible state of depression made manifest. In keeping with his devotion to all things operatic, von Trier begins his film with an overture of staggering, awful beauty. Over the strains of the prelude to Wagner’s <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>, Justine appears in close-up, slowly opening her eyes as birds fall out of the sky around her. <span class="pullquote">The real world is a dream, it seems, and the only thing that will wake her is its destruction, captured in her fevered imaginings of the apocalypse: Justine in a bridal gown, struggling forward as gray tendrils pull at her legs, then adrift in the water, Millais’s drowned Ophelia.</span></p>
<p>The prologue showcases von Trier at his best, melding formalism to high dramatics. So how does one respond to this vision of end times? By giggling, of course. Critics’ screenings are usually moribund affairs, but a von Trier film will break the pall like nothing else. One pivotal scene in <i>Antichrist</i>—in which a mangled fox, gnawing at its entrails, turns to a soon-to-be mangled Willem Dafoe and intones in its best James Earl Jones voice: “Chaos reigns” (<a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/merchandise/">scroll down</a> to see it immortalized on these film-nerd T-shirts)—unleashed a hootenanny of braying and knee-slapping more commonly heard during an episode of <i>Hee-Haw</i>. Oh no, he <i>di’nt</i>, I caught myself shouting, but oh yes, von Trier had.</p>
<p>With his nasty humor, his whiplashing between sarcasm and sincerity, and the torturous visions on screen, von Trier leaves a viewer with little idea of what to do, save pant with anxiety or titter nervously. After cackling through <i>Melancholia</i>’s bravura prologue, though, the audience settled into von Trier’s tale of two sisters, painted as two halves of a psychological and metaphysical whole. The first half of the film focuses in on Justine's ghastly wedding day, and the second on the sensible Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg, in a wonderfully sensitive performance) as she faces the destruction of the earth. In this dual disaster flick, <i>Melancholia</i> is not only a description of Justine’s state of mind—it’s also a planet now on a collision course with Earth. This is no spoiler, as the prologue makes clear. The film’s charm, if you want to call it that, is that death has been foretold, and we’re along for the final countdown.</p>
<p class="break">***</p>
<p>At first, Justine and her hapless groom (Alexander Skarsgård) seem on a lark, giggling that they are two hours late to the wedding hosted by Claire and her pompous wag of a husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland, as professionally clenched as ever), because their rented stretch limo can’t make it up the country road to John’s estate. This innocent beginning soon tips into outright chaos, with the wedding guests putting on a parade of bad manners—boorish and preening, or spitting out a wedding toast that seems to sum up the film’s message: Enjoy it while you can.</p>
<p>Who could hold it together in such circumstances? Certainly not Justine, whose inner despair has a creamy voluptuousness to it, a seductive grip on her she can’t break. After she capitulates to her crack-up, Justine can’t resist the urge to set the wedding’s empty rituals ablaze, to her sister’s dismay. Von Trier’s films are experiential ones—while <i>Melancholia</i>’s counterpart, <i>Antichrist</i> puts its audience through the screaming hell inside its female character’s mind, <i>Melancholia</i> inspires the helpless rage that those hollowed out by depression can transfer to those who care for them. When Claire, surveying the wedding’s wreckage, hisses to her sister, “Sometimes I hate you so much,” one can’t help but feel a frisson of Claire’s fury. </p>
<p>Until von Trier effects a role reversal of sorts. Part two, named after Claire, plays like a syrupy nightmare where everything moves at half-speed but inspires twice the panic. Melancholia in the form of a glassy-eyed, whimpering Justine has moved into the castle post-wedding fiasco; the planet Melancholia draws ever closer to the earth. <span class="pullquote">The nearer Earth’s doom comes, however, the more perversely calm Justine gets, even as Claire finds herself clinging to life and the niceties that give her some sense of order.</span> Claire’s husband John is an amateur astronomer—he attempts to reassure Claire and their young son with scientific certainties, blissfully unaware that he is in a von Trier film and that men espousing logical platitudes inevitably come to an inelegant end. In this film, told from Justine’s (and perhaps von Trier’s) worldview, there is no truth but impending catastrophe, and no end more gratifying than death. As Melancholia looms in the night sky, Justine strips down and basks in its light, as though she is readying herself for a lover.</p>
<p>She is, in a way. It’s no mistake that von Trier has scored his film to <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>, that epic paean of longing for a love as deep as death. In the first frames, Justine opens her eyes just as the famed “Tristan chord” sounds, a torturous bit of harmonic limbo that doesn’t reach resolution until Isolde sings out her death five hours later—that chord an endless suspension that mirrors Justine’s long wait for external reality to consummate her most disastrous desires. But in the end, the fact that her annihilation could consume even the innocent brings out compassion in Justine, and she attempts to cast a spell of magical thinking around her beloved nephew and her terrified sister. In depicting that futile, loving act, the film becomes a rebuttal to its own prevailing narrative of despair—for what is any great work of art but a brave whistle in the dark? That the two sisters—one embodying the desire for death, the other facing the death of desire—should be together in their final moments … what is that but a happy ending?</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:20:50 +0000208205 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewPast Helphttps://prospect.org/article/past-help
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Nostalgia for our recent past can be a complicated, addictive little bromide. As anyone surveying the post-Mad Men cultural landscape can attest, the radiant outfits and the sleek design are all the visual rage. Just as compelling is the dramatic irony that can be engendered by depictions of casual racism and other social ills - the sense of relief for at least some viewers that "things aren't like that any more." </p>
<p><em>The Help</em> could go down just as smoothly. Based on Kathryn Stockett's fictional bestseller about two African-American maids and the white woman who helps publish their tell-all stories about their work in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, the film is a stylish little number, burnished to a high glow and draped in saturated color. Both book and film are dosed with the sugar required to make a racial-justice message palatable for mainstream audiences - a white heroine as the catalyst or conduit for social change, a white villain who is so despicable that viewers can congratulate themselves that they aren't nearly so racist. Despite these conventions, both also offer a rare examination into the messiness of interdependence and intimacy across categories of race and class, and expose the fruitlessness of the eternal, human pursuit of trying to reimagine what is real. "Separate but equal" was the mantra of the times - <em>The Help</em> demonstrates just why it was that many whites clung to that phrase: blacks and whites were deeply entangled and just as unequal. </p>
<p>So aren't we relieved that things are so much better now? We shouldn't be, because they aren't. While <em>The Help</em> may pitch itself as a peep into the past, as another Southerner, William Faulkner, has written, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." There are 2.5 million domestic workers in the States - the vast majority of whom are women of color, working without the federally recognized right to collectively bargain, organize, or receive overtime pay. Nor do they receive protection from most anti-discrimination or occupational safety laws. That was the situation during the time of The Help, and that is the situation now - an unresolved part of our bitter history with slavery. </p>
<p>As Franklin Delano Roosevelt began negotiations on labor reforms in 1937, ads began popping up in newspapers: "Housewives beware! If the Wages and Hours Bill goes through, you will have to pay your Negro girl eleven dollars a week." In order to pass what would become the New Deal, Roosevelt conceded to Southern Dixiecrat concerns over the scope of the reforms and cut domestic and agricultural workers out of the protections - two areas that were the province of house slaves and field slaves in the past, and the largely the province of poor blacks in the FDR era and poor immigrants and people of color now. </p>
<p>The Help has a modern-day update, however - the domestic-worker organizing by groups like <a href=" www.domesticworkersunited.org/">Domestic Workers United</a> and the <a href=" www.domesticworkers.org/">National Domestic Workers Alliance</a>. Organizing these workers started around the kitchen tables and in parks where nannies take their charges to play, and advanced to the streets and State Senates. It led to the passage of the New York Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights last year, the first in the country. It set minimum wages, overtime pay and day of rest guarantees, along with insurance and anti-discrimination protections for harms suffered on the job - huge gains for the women whose labor of love has scarcely been recognized as work. There's an ongoing campaign to pass similar legislation in California, <a href="http://www.domesticworkers.org/movie-the-help-shines-light-to-the-struggles-of-the-real-help ">has</a> with a bill in the state Senate appropriations committee. There's a worldwide effort as well, with the recent International Labour Organization adoption of a convention on domestic workers. <a href="http://www.domesticworkers.org/victory-at-last-domestic-workers-win-global-recognition-with-the-adoption-of-the-ilo-convention-for-domestic-workers">http://www.domesticworkers.org/victory-at-last-domestic-workers-win-glob...</a></p>
<p><em><em>The Help</em></em> makes bare mention of legal protections or politics. The scope of the movie is distinctly small-scale, the sort of intimate Sirkian world of "women's pictures." Protection from employer retaliation is coded in the potential to smear the boss's reputation amongst the bridge-circle set, and restorative justice is rendered as sweet, personal revenge. Both film and book draw on Manichean melodrama that is as squirm-inducing as it is effective - issues also reflected in criticism of the book as a white woman's (mis)appropriation of black women's unheard voices. Stockett, a white writer, uses dialect to write her black characters' narratives and thoughts and her book, she explains in her afterword, is an attempt to answer the question never asked of the beloved black maid, Demetrie, who raised her: What is your life like? With this, her white-writer heroine seems a stand-in for herself, and <em>The Help</em> a form of genuine, empathetic penance turned profitable. </p>
<p>And yet, these issues didn't diminish the emotional impact of Stockett's work or of the film. Those obvious machinations and broad characterizations somehow pack quite a wallop, and <em>The Help</em> will punch you in the face with them until you cry. I did not care that back-talking Minny (the ferociously funny Octavia Spencer) was just one finger-wag away from a sassy-sidekick cliche, or that Aibileen (Viola Davis, in a deeply felt, beautifully modulated performance) seemed like she had climbed down from the cross and put on a maid's apron, or even that Miss Celia (the girlishly radiant Jessica Chastain) was wish-fulfillment made flesh - a Marilyn Monroe-esque giggly wriggler who doesn't have a racist thought in her bottle-blonde head. </p>
<p>Nor did it matter that the film upped the book's scatology quotient by dwelling at length in the first half with a campaign to pass legislation mandating the use of separate bathrooms in white homes employing black help, and in the second with a particularly nasty (but amply earned) bit of revenge. That obsession with filth seemed like a clumsy, overly literal way to grapple with something quite difficult to depict. The women of <em>The Help</em>, like domestic workers today, do work that is absolutely vital but is rendered so invisible by those who have been nurtured by it. How is it that many of the little white children so loved by their black maids, grow up to ignore, exclude, and oppress them? <em>The Help</em> poses the question but doesn't venture an answer, which lies, if one were to wax psychological, in the murk of trying to avoid the vulnerability engendered in needing another's care, in living in a body, frail in youth, failing in age, that may require it. <em>The Help's</em> more racist characters cling to the illusion that money or a sense of ownership or power could erase this dependency, or that one can flee or project on to others the existential, metaphorical and physical filth that is already in all of us. But as <em>The Help</em> testifies, we are all mixed up together, for better or worse, and there is no escape from our shared destiny, or from the complicated love and need that can develop despite what is seen as dividing us. </p>
<p>All this, Minny might say, is crazy talk. <em>The Help</em> doesn't delve much into the political or philosophical, even as it flirts with it. As Minny says in the film, "We're not doing civil rights, we're just telling stories like they really happened," before she and Aibileen burst into laughter, recognizing just how subversive their stories can be. <em>The Help</em> is in thrall to the ways in which oral histories can become history - but, of course, it is starting only at the beginning of that process. It doesn't trace the ways telling stories around the kitchen table can lead to a movement, and while the film is clear on the risk the trio is taking to publish their stories, the dynamism of the era's organizing and the brutal violence it faced are merely feinted at in shots of newspaper headlines and TV footage of the attacks on the Freedom Rides, and the assassination of Medgar Evers. The great feature film about the workings of the civil-rights movement or about current organizing has yet to be made. Fortunately, in the parks over baby carriages, in the rallies on the streets, in the lobbying at state senates, the sequel to <em>The Help</em>'s stories is unfolding -- a potential path to lead us out of the problems of the past, and present. </p>
<p>Many thanks to Ai-Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Priscilla Gonzalez of Domestic Workers United for sharing their thoughts and expertise.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:50:19 +0000207601 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewOutsider Arthttps://prospect.org/article/outsider-art-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The options have never been pretty for Iranian filmmakers critical of their government. They can choose artistic death by the censor's thousand cuts, films flash-screened in one theater, or "distribution" through pirated DVDs on the streets of Tehran. Or they can stick to their creative vision and face exile or jail time. </p>
<p>Bahman Ghobadi chose exile -- although "chose" scarcely seems like the appropriate word. The Iranian authorities had suggested that the Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker leave the country numerous times over the years, and turned up the pressure two days before the June 2009 presidential elections that sparked the Green Revolution protest of the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. </p>
<p>Ghobadi's crimes? Making films in Kurdish, granting interviews to foreign media, and making movies about sensitive matters, the director told <i>Filmmaker</i> magazine. But according to the doyen of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami, Ghobadi's real sin was leaving Iran -- and making a film that encouraged others to leave as well. </p>
<p>"If Bahman Ghobadi thinks there are better circumstances for creating movies outside of Iran, I congratulate him," Kiarostami, Iran's most internationally celebrated filmmaker, told local media -- even though his latest film was shot in Italy and stars Juliette Binoche. "But for me, personally, I don't believe in leaving Iran. The place I can sleep comfortably is my home."</p>
<p>For Ghobadi, who was once Kiarostami's assistant director, the criticism stung. "My dear and respected Master! I, and all film-lovers, respect your opinion on cinema," Ghobadi wrote in a public letter. "But that does not mean that we can allow you, in the manner of dictators, to tell everybody in the art world what to do. ... How can you allow yourself, with nasty words, to mock filmmakers who try to support the oppressed people, and worse, to state, in the language of religious dictators, what is forbidden?" </p>
<p>The filmmakers' exchange reflects the tensions arising from an orchestrated campaign to attack Western cultural influences and establish a new government office to oversee Iranian cinema. "Today we see that the enemy is ambushing us culturally and increasing the intensity of its attacks," Javad Shamaghdari of the Ministry of Culture and Guidance said last December. "Our cinema must find its place, and this is the responsibility of filmmakers to take on this role."</p>
<p>So far, the campaign seems to consist of "convincing" filmmakers of this responsibility by jailing them. Outspoken director Jafar Panahi was imprisoned for nearly three months this spring for his support of the Green Movement and for filming without a permit. At the Cannes Film Festival this year, fellow filmmakers left a chair empty to protest Panahi's absence from the jury. </p>
<p>Other Iranian filmmakers have suffered similar fates. Mohammad Ali Shirzadi was arrested in January; his family believes his detention is connected to an interview the director filmed between human-rights activist Emadeddin Baghi and the late Islamic theologian Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. In April, filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad was sentenced to 50 lashes and three and a half years in prison for "insulting" the country's leadership after last year's elections. And in a telling turn of events, Narges Kalhor, the daughter of Ahmadinejad's media and cultural adviser, screened her short film based on Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" at a human-rights film festival in Germany -- and then applied for political asylum in order to avoid detention in Iran.</p>
<p>The debate between Ghobadi and his former mentor raises the big questions about artists who are, by the nature of their work, dissidents. Have artists who are not hassled by their repressive governments been rendered toothless by self-censorship? Does overtly political art even stand on its artistic merits, or is its value mainly ideological? And perhaps the hardest question of all: In a perilous environment like Iran, should an artist stay or go? </p>
<p>***</p>
<p>The ruckus was started by Ghobadi's 2009 film called <i>No One Knows About Persian Cats</i>. Screening across the United States this summer, it focuses on Negar (Negar Shaghaghi) and Ashkan (Ashkan Koshanejad), two musicians playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. In this documentary-feature hybrid, the two young people attempt to form a band and smuggle themselves out of Iran for a gig in Europe. It's a clever, loose-limbed premise that allows Ghobadi to introduce Tehran's underground musicians, who play everything from emo indie ballads to hard-hitting rap. Whether for its fascinating Iranian-Western mash-up qualities, its reliance on female vocalists (women are prohibited from public singing in Iran), or its defiant attitude, the music is banned by authorities and therefore practiced and played in secret, often literally underground in basements and hidden crawl spaces. In one case, a stable serves as a practice space for a nu-metal band, whose music has traumatized the cows, according to one farmworker. </p>
<p>Even as it revels in the musicians' persistence and bravery, the film hints that this is no way to lead a life -- an understandable sentiment considering the difficulties Ghobadi has faced. He scripted the film with his fiancee Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who was accused of spying in 2009, imprisoned, and only released after months of international protest. <i>Persian Cats</i> was born out of frustration after the director had worked for two years to prepare a project called <i>60 Seconds About Us</i> but was denied permission to begin shooting. Because the Iranian authorities own all 35-millimeter equipment and require directors to obtain shooting authorization to rent it, Ghobadi bought a smaller, digital camera in order to circumvent the policy and decided to test out his camera by filming Tehran's sprawling underground music scene. During the course of the 17-day shoot, he was arrested twice. </p>
<p>Ghobadi has always been something of an outsider -- as a Kurd with no recognized homeland; as a Kurdish speaker censured by Iranian authorities for making films in his native language; and as a Sunni Muslim, a religious minority in Shiite Iran. His films have reflected this outsider status in their border-zone settings, and in the ways his protagonists -- children selling foraged live mines (<i>Turtles Can Fly</i>), an irascible old man searching for his ex-wife in the bleak, bombed-out mountains of Kurdistan (<i>Marooned in Iraq</i>) -- scratch out their survival despite the authorities' abandonment or overt antagonism. </p>
<p>Gifted with this outsider's eye, it's little surprise that Ghobadi has turned to guerilla-esque digital-camera tactics, in just the way that Iranian and Burmese citizens in a media blackout used their cell phones to capture images of brutality and resistance in widespread protests in 2007 in Rangoon and last year in Tehran. And with his latest quasi-documentary, politically critical film, Ghobadi shares a common sensibility with China's young "Sixth Generation" filmmakers who have also taken up smaller digital cameras to make films about migrants, the poor, and the marginalized.</p>
<p>Kiarostami is a very different filmmaker, but an outsider as well -- although Western critics consider him the key figure in the "Iranian New Wave," within Iran, Kiarostami is often accused of being estranged from or irrelevant in his homeland. His films are marked by long, pastoral shots; a fondness for meta-narrative framing; and a spare sensibility in which narrative elements are less important than metaphysical ambiguity (did that character die or what?). Also an esteemed photographer, Kiarostami has recently started creating films with fixed-camera perspectives that seem more like art installations than anything resembling Ghobadi's latest exercise in wild kineticism. But even more than the filmmakers' respective "looks," they espouse different philosophies -- Ghobadi's art as testimony or evidence, and Kiarostami's art as ... artifice. As Kiarostami once wrote, "We can never get close to the truth except through lying." </p>
<p>Despite his emblematic art-house style, Kiarostami's work is not without its own critique. Watch an ornery child ranting against his single mother (<i>Ten</i>), or a pizza-delivery man lumbering through the parties, palaces, and poverty of Tehran (<i>Crimson Gold</i>, which Kiarostami wrote but did not direct), and what emerges are portraits of everyday people attempting to cope with what they can't control, not so different from the theme of Ghobadi's latest film.</p>
<p>The toxicity of Iran's artistic environment -- and Westerners' tendency to search for themes of trouble and repression in Iranian cinema -- has created a forced dynamic between Kiarostami and Ghobadi camps. But even those directors do not fit cleanly into two categories. Their feud -- and the fight-or-flight question faced by all artists in repressive regimes -- sets up a false choice and a false dichotomy. Filmmakers need both the ability to realize their internal, ambiguous artistic vision <i>and</i> the ability to present clear protest -- and the freedom to move fluidly between those two motivations. The quiet in Kiarostami's films and the songs of Ghobadi's speak to the same point -- in the face of imposed silence, it's better to have more voices, whispering in poetry, shouting in song, testifying and lying, rather than fewer.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:53:05 +0000148716 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewA Kitchen of One's Ownhttps://prospect.org/article/kitchen-ones-own-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Ah, Julia Child. The happy hooting, the knowing yet sloppy kitchen technique, the stevedore shoulders and ribald sense of humor -- Child is in the news again as the Julia half of Nora Ephron's latest film, <i>Julie &amp; Julia</i>, and the subject of Michael Pollan's recent paean in <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>.</p>
<p>Why is Child in the spotlight again five years after her death? Child was a larger-than-life personality, in both her 6-foot-2-inch stature and in her influence -- she pioneered the TV cooking show and took the fear factor out of French food. But even more than this, as Pollan asserts, she's become a potent symbol of our nation's nostalgia for real cooking, which we both pine for and do precious little of in our lives. </p>
<p>Pollan, the author of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143038583?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=theamerpros-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0143038583">The Omnivore's Dilemma </a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" alt="" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=theamerpros-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0143038583" /></i> and the de-facto face of the resurgent food movement, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html">celebrates</a> Child as the high priestess of cooking done for its own sake. "Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal," he writes. "It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn't do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself." </p>
<p>In Ephron's film, cooking is a similarly ennobling practice -- one that gives shape and meaning to lives in drift. A bored housewife in 1950s Paris, Child is shown casting about desperately for "something to dooooo," as she yodels (brilliantly embodied by Meryl Streep), fussing with hatmaking before taking culinary school by storm. Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a beleaguered civil servant, seeks out the structured salvation of "something you have to do, every day, one day at a time" by deciding to cook and blog her way through Child's great <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307291146?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=theamerpros-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0307291146">Mastering the Art of French Cooking</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" alt="" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=theamerpros-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0307291146" /></i>. </p>
<p>I can see how cooking can become an art and a calling. I think of it as alchemy, a physical practice of an abstract skill in transforming whatever we're given to work with -- literally and otherwise. I can use this kind of purple prose to talk about cooking not only because I love it but because I'm footloose and fancy-free -- I'm single, childless, and have enough economic security to engage in bourgeois salivating over the joy of culinary experimentation. Simply put, I don't have to cook unless I want to, nor do I have to cook anything but what I want. The truth is it's difficult to conceive of cooking being a calling if you have to do it every day on a budget, for demanding audiences like children. (Julia and Julie are both childless, not surprisingly.) </p>
<p>While he hasn't forgotten the plight of those who cook to feed their families more than their own artistic souls, Pollan seems to lay a disproportionate amount of the blame for our increasingly canned, frozen, and hastily assembled meals on those who already carry a disproportionate amount of the responsibility for providing them. Pollan primarily faults ever-present advertising for our convenience-food reliant meals, but women's participation in the work force has also played a part, he argues, as have some unhelpful second-wave feminists who left the joy of cooking "thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen." After giving women a good prod -- and failing to analyze why it is that men still only cook 13 percent of family meals -- Pollan tries to even things out with an egalitarian call to arms to battle our obesity-causing, socially isolating, Hungry Man eating ways: <i>Everyone</i> should get back into the kitchen. </p>
<p>And everyone should cook like Julia, it seems. The shows of "Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee -- tend to be aimed at stay-at-home moms who are in a hurry and eager to please. … These shows stress quick results, shortcuts and superconvenience but never the sort of pleasure -- physical and mental -- that Julia Child took in the work of cooking. … In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television," Pollan writes. </p>
<p>For many a food snob, Rachael Ray is a noxious perkinator who disrespects the low smoking point of extra-virgin olive oil or EVOO, as she calls it, but she deserves real kudos for helping moms perform the monumental and thankless task of putting up a tasty dinner on the table day after day. Disliking the make-it-easy cooking style of Rachael Ray has become a sort of shibboleth into the world of foodie-ism, however -- and it smacks of the casual sexist divide in the culinary world, where "women's cooking" is considered sparrow-brown, utilitarian work done for free, while men's involvement brings cultural cachet and economic reward. Child herself, held up as a feminist icon, certainly seemed to value men in the culinary world. When William Rice became the food editor of <i>The Washington Post</i> in 1972, she trumpeted, "I'm all for having MEN in these positions; it immediately lifts it out of the housewifery Dullsville category and into the important things of life!" More than 30 years after Child's comment, men still get paid to helm the kitchen, engage in the sort of gladiatorial antics of <i>Iron Chef</i> and other spectator-sport food shows, and whip food into what others consider art far more often than women get to. </p>
<p>What does it take to make a more egalitarian kitchen in American homes and restaurants? Ephron's film provides some surprising answers, if only in typical rom-com guise. While the Julie sections pale in comparison to the Julia Child sequences, the scenes of the Childs' intertwined but also independent lives are deeply moving -- and inspiring. Streep and Stanley Tucci play the unconventional couple with a warmth that is nearly tactile. Paul Child leads his own life but is also unstinting in his support of his wife's unusual raison d'etre, even seems to revel in it. What does it take for a partner -- or a society -- to recognize, cherish, and make time and space for women's lives, work, and art? </p>
<p>If Pollan were more of a feminist, he'd be calling for what Virginia Woolf might have termed a kitchen of one's own, where cooking is a creative work of love done for oneself. But a scaffolding of support is necessary for such a space -- not only love but all the material conditions of a living wage, sound child care, and humane working hours. This would allow a truly shared division of housework -- for women and men to have the chance to play in the kitchen and experience the joy of creative work, if they so desire. This kitchen of one's own should be a place a woman can leave and a man can preside over -- after all, why should only women be the protectors of a lost culinary idyll? </p>
<p>It should be a place where a woman could have the luxury of blowing up dinner if she wants to try something new or where she can just throw something together to feed the family -- and still have her efforts recognized if not as high art, then as fundamental and important labor even if not made perfectly from scratch. And it should be a place where a woman can develop her culinary voice toward the goal of being a professional, well-compensated chef and not just be stuck in the purgatory of "women's cooking." Talking about the preconditions for this kitchen of one's own may not be as sexy and toothsome as Child's signature <i>boeuf bourguignon</i>, but the idea of those sorts of partners, and that sort of world, is delicious to contemplate and just as deserving of Child's TV signoff, her battle cry, her celebratory toast -- bon appetit. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:00:18 +0000148173 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewThe Soderbergh Experiencehttps://prospect.org/article/soderbergh-experience
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Steven Soderbergh's <i>The Girlfriend Experience</i> opens with a coolly rendered illusion. An immaculately dressed man and woman chat in a taxi, then over dinner, later trading kisses and whispers in a hotel room before curling up in bed together. Their casual, familiar rapport extends into a bathrobe breakfast the next morning, and it isn't until the woman walks away with a fat envelope of cash that viewers grasp that the two aren't a couple in the usual sense. The man is a wealthy financial-services type, just one of many who avail themselves of the services of Chelsea, a high-priced Manhattan escort who offers the film's titular "girlfriend experience" -- emotional intimacies that go beyond sex.</p>
<p>Shot on digital video in 16 days, <i>The Girlfriend Experience</i> is a typical Soderbergh offering, centering on process -- <i>how</i> a character goes through his or her life, rather than a psychologically oriented query about <i>why</i>. The film trails Chelsea through her daily routine --heatless dates and bedroom encounters, sprinkled with a variety of "strategy meetings" with an accountant, a Web-page designer, a sex blogger-critic, a journalist interested in profiling her. Each offers advice or potential services to help Chelsea expand her brand; each also wants his pound of flesh from her. Chelsea does have a personal life -- she lives with a physical trainer who tries to quell his apprehension about her work -- but the film doesn't dwell long on Chelsea's real-life girlfriend experience. More than anything, <i>Girlfriend Experience</i> presents Chelsea as a freelance worker trying to get ahead in uncertain times. </p>
<p>Drawing deeply on a vein of capitalist critique, <i>Girlfriend Experience</i> is set in the shaky days of October 2008 -- the bailout and the election loom on the horizon, and all Chelsea's clients can talk of is the impending financial crack-up. The libidinal current of <i>Girlfriend Experience</i> isn't sex, contrary to what one might expect from a film with real-life adult-film actor Sasha Grey in the starring role -- it's money and status. Everyone in the film -- from Chelsea herself to her boyfriend to Chelsea's financier clients -- is jockeying for position, and each interaction is colored with transactional calculations. </p>
<p>In addition to providing Soderbergh the opportunity to mull over meta-questions of acting and verisimilitude, art and reality, Chelsea makes a convenient metaphor for the hustling such economic end days seem to demand. But in crafting this conceit, Soderbergh loses sight of the particularities of Chelsea's situation. Not everyone's a whore, as my viewing companion Karen reminded me -- in our society, only a whore is a whore. Only Chelsea is doing work that is illegal, bears a heavy social stigma, and serves as a rhetorical and legislative hot-button issue. Soderbergh attempts to use Chelsea as a symbol to demonstrate how we're all cogs in a flawed, insecure system, but in order to do so, he strips her work of the complexity and conflict from which it is enmeshed in the real world. A pity, as Soderbergh could have made a truly fascinating film about the real-life logistics of someone in Chelsea's position. How does she deal with banking and taxes? With the possibility of run-ins with law enforcement? With the psychological aspects of concealing part of her life? </p>
<p>Soderbergh tries for a kind of egalitarianism by both disregarding the stigma and illegality of Chelsea's work and by tarring up his male characters -- Chelsea's trainer boyfriend is far more aggressive in his attempts to shake down clients and employers than she is; Chelsea also has an unfortunate encounter with a gross sex blogger, who wants to sample her wares for free in exchange for a glowing write-up. Played by entertainment writer and film critic Glenn Kenny, the self-styled "erotic connoisseur," he gives <i>Girlfriend Experience</i> a welcome, greasy jolt. He presents such a feast of entertaining loathsomeness that he scarcely seems real -- but this caricatured portrait also underscores the fact that none of the other men, played with blank verisimilitude, would be viewed as harshly as Chelsea would in the real world. </p>
<p>Not only does Soderbergh strip Chelsea of the potential, gendered complications of her situation, but he also hollows out her interior in the attempt to make her the vehicle for his whore-as-metaphor economic critique. Part of this may be Grey's acting, which is affectless to the point of being inert -- intentionally so, perhaps, as it renders her a convenient canvas on which Soderbergh can work out his ideas. They're interesting ones, at least in theory. Can a person become a product? What is the line between economic empowerment and social degradation? And the perpetual meta-narrative question: What part of this act is real anyway? </p>
<p>In practice, however, Soderbergh only feints at providing Chelsea with the inner life that would flesh out these questions with real import. She begins to open up to a new client -- is she succumbing to the seduction of the girlfriend experience as well? But neither the film nor Grey has enough conviction to carry off this sort of emotional coup, and Soderbergh is too infatuated with his undifferentiated we're-all-hustling-now economic critique and hall-of-mirrors film structure to allow his dramatic scrim a life of her own ? or to question the ways in which Chelsea?s financier clients may have contributed to our current fix. </p>
<p>Soderbergh toys with the question of authenticity -- his casting Grey provides viewers with a frisson of will-she or won't-she (she won't) -- but the main romance here is of friction with a fiction, an enthrallment with the fantasy of surfaces, celluloid, and otherwise. The film opens with a discussion of the movie Chelsea and her client have just seen and ends with the sex blogger's cruel review of Chelsea's performance -- the whole continuum of film and its consumption, from acting to viewing to critiquing. Soderbergh just can't resist the urge to get in his double bill -- to create a superficial quid-pro-quo critique of economic and emotional transaction and to use Chelsea's navel to gaze at his own and ponder film, illusion, and reality. The film is a great tease -- one that could have offered specific and trenchant economic insight and a character who had real wholeness. Instead, Soderbergh settles for replicating the fake reality, the real fakery of "the girlfriend experience," a slippery fantasy dolled up in drab critique. As Chelsea tells the nosy journalist, "They want you to be what they want you to be." </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 29 May 2009 15:40:24 +0000148011 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewThe Power of Political Personalityhttps://prospect.org/article/power-political-personality
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Watching Steven Soderbergh's <i>Che</i> as Obama begins his presidency was a curious experience -- a chance to ponder both the power of personality and the seductive notion that change can be embodied in one individual. Ernest "Che" Guevara was of a different moment, of course -- the Argentine doctor-turned-revolutionary was an uncompromising man more interested in blowing up bridges than in building them, more interested in war-tinged rhetoric than in that of service. </p>
<p>Che earned his revolutionary stripes in his campaign, alongside Fidel Castro, to liberate Cuba from the despotic U.S.-backed leader Fulgencia Batista. His record in the wake of peace is spottier, however -- he had disastrous turns as the commander of La Cabana prison, where he was in charge of purging Batista's ranks; as head of Cuba's National Bank; and as the minister of industry. He left behind those positions to foment revolution in other countries, including the Congo and Mozambique -- victory in Cuba seemed conditional and fraught with the cowardice of compromises. He was a Byronic hero to the end, and as essayist Alma Guillermoprieto chronicles in "The Harsh Angel," her scathing, poetic dissection of Che's legacy, he left behind a near cult of martyrdom and death in the movements he inspired throughout Latin America. </p>
<p>Che's image has become somewhat divorced from his complicated past, thanks to the iconic photograph snapped by Alberto "Korda" Diaz Gutierrez at a mass funeral. The image, known as "Guerrillero Heroico," now adorns T-shirts, posters, and advertising, and is perhaps one of the most widely reproduced photographic images in the world. For those who still idolize Che and the gaze of sorrow, purpose, and action captured in that photo, he represents a purity of conviction, a belief in endless (and ultimately unsustainable) revolution. But such men are symbols for a reason, perhaps because the measure of reality does not quite match up to dreams -- theirs or our own. </p>
<p> In light of Che's larger-than-life image, Soderbergh makes an intriguing decision to focus on the grainy, everyday texture of two of Che's battlefield campaigns. <i>Che</i> opened briefly last year in a special "road show" version for Oscar consideration, clocking in at a whopping four-plus hours. Shown now in two parts, the film focuses on the successful battle to divest Cuba of Batista in <i>Che: Part One</i>, and in <i>Che: Part Two</i>, the unraveling of Che's misguided mission to liberate Bolivia, which resulted in his capture and execution by the CIA-backed military. </p>
<p> In <i>Part One</i>, Soderbergh cuts battlefield scenes with black-and-white faux-archival footage of Che addressing the United Nations and coping with journalist interviews and fawning fans. As the revolution was being built, so was the image of the revolutionary. Part Two is the Cuban campaign in dreadful rewind -- tactical errors, comrades felled by bullets, and worst of all, a peasant class that refuses to join a cause fought in their name. </p>
<p><i>Che</i> is that uncommon thing -- the precise epic, every detail saturated in verisimilitude, the whole as carefully constructed as a miniature ship in a bottle. The films are packed with endless dates and details -- it's lucky that Smell-o-Vision never caught on, otherwise the director probably would have assaulted viewers' nostrils with Eau de Gamy Revolutionary. Che was not fond of baths -- as a boy, his nickname was "Chancho" or "pig," and rebel life surely did not grant much time for bourgeois activities like bathing. </p>
<p>Soderbergh is obsessed with process -- as his slick <i>Oceans Umpteenth</i> series reveals, he is consumed more with the how of a heist than the why of it. This approach enables <i>Che</i> to avoid the banal medley structure of most biopics, along with the psychologizing that reduces subjects to a grab bag of trauma and redemptive uplift. For a while, it's fascinating -- Soderbergh depicts the revolution as an unglamorous affair that consists of organizing guard-duty shifts and refereeing squabbles between troops, and Benecio del Toro's Che presides over it all in a squinty, distant version of his usual charisma. But after a while, the films become an existential drag, especially by the end of the grim <i>Part Two</i>. </p>
<p>Even in the exuberant <i>Part One</i>, Soderbergh's so invested in the minutiae of process that he denies his viewers the satisfaction of seeing the triumphant rebels enter Havana. A daring choice -- perhaps an illustration of Che's belief in resistance without end and in the fact that this self-willed individual never became the "new man" he so passionately wanted to embody. But also a taxing experience for the viewer, who may wish for the middlebrow conventions of climax after so many days in the forest with Che and his band of hairy men. </p>
<p> Despite the forced-march feel of the films, <i>Che</i> intrigues on the structural level. The films' diptych set-up presents a dialectic that would have pleased its subject -- and reflects Che's own contradictions. After all, Che is the man who once said that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love" but also that "hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines." Where his movement was once a sensitive, organic response to the times and the desires of the people, it became ossified and estranged from the masses for which he claimed to be fighting. </p>
<p>Che is best appreciated as an enigma caught between twin urges, poised on the brink of calamitous action. Soderbergh does a masterful, if grueling, presentation on how these tensions played out in Che's everyday decisions in battle and has created an intriguing cautionary tale for pinning so much hope on only one man. Even within the restricted scope of <i>Che</i>, Soderbergh makes clear the problems of a cult of personality separated from the people, and a revolution that has ceased to be responsive. </p>
<p>Our times begin where Che's ended, however -- it's difficult to imagine him leading a government and not a war, harder still to imagine him as an old man, a plump apparatchik dandling grandchildren bored of his jungle tales. Luckily for him, he died before that could happen and before he could know what his image would become -- wrested from its revolutionary roots, a handsome man with an arresting gaze, haunted by demons others had forgotten. The communist has become the ultimate commodity, even the butt of the Argentinean joke: Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué," or "I have a Che T-shirt and I don't know why." Che was unable to achieve his dream, but it was no matter -- the people made a new man of him in the end. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:38:19 +0000147776 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewDancing on Airhttps://prospect.org/article/dancing-air
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Nearly three decades before the World Trade Center towers became sites of real-life tragedy and mythic icons of the war on terrorism, they served as the staging ground for an entirely different act. On August 7, 1974, a tiny figure stepped out into the space between the buildings. He didn't fall, nor did he jump -- although audiences watching James Marsh’s Sundance award-winning documentary <i>Man On Wire</i> may be reminded of the terrible images of those who did during 9/11. Philippe Petit was actually balancing on a wire suspended between the structures, but from the ground, it looked as if he was walking on nothing but air. </p>
<p>The diminutive Frenchman capered on his wire for 45 minutes -- dancing, lying down, kneeling and saluting, and traipsing across the void between the buildings no less than eight times before he delivered himself into the arms of the police, who promptly handcuffed the funambulist. Petit responded by balancing a policeman's cap on his nose. </p>
<p>He handled the American media's questions with equal irreverence. According to <i>Man on Wire</i>, reporters were obsessed with one main question: "Why did you do it?" Fifty-eight-year-old Petit, his voice crackling with amusement, recounts his response to those "so American" questions: "There is no why." </p>
<p><i>Man on Wire</i> is extraordinary in many ways -- perhaps most notably in its refusal to offer explanations. It treats both its artistic subject and its audience with a kind of respectful reticence, and gives us the hermeneutical responsibility, the gift, to work through the possible significance of Petit’s act on our own. In so doing, the film sidesteps the pitfalls that often plague movies about artists -- the psychological reductionism used to "explain" their work, the "and-then" medley of greatest hits from the subjects' art and life, all the labels that wind up disengaging us from the shock of great art. </p>
<p>The film also keeps a wise silence on the matter of 9/11, although for many viewers the specter of that day will haunt <i>Man on Wire</i> from its earliest frames. Near the beginning of the film, director James Marsh split-screens scenes from Petit's childhood with footage from what appears to be Ground Zero. Only after I noticed the grainy quality of the images did I understand that I was seeing footage of the WTC's construction, not its destruction. </p>
<p><i>Man On Wire</i> is structured like a heist film -- much of the documentary is narrated by Petit, his then-girlfriend Annie, his childhood friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, two stoner Americans, an inside man who worked in one of the towers, and others as they recount how they staged this guerilla tour de force. They planned what they aptly called <i>le coup</i> down to the last detail, as the 9/11 hijackers did their own plot. But they did so to the opposite end -- Petit's wire-walking didn't seek to create a thunderous Armageddon pitting one power against another. He staged his act of subversion, his playful play, in the empty space between the towers, thereby turning what they seemed to represent upside down. Those shrines to notions of progress and the spirit of capitalism were merely incidental, the background for an act of wild, unexplainable beauty. Petit had no cause, no answer. The film makes mention of none of this, however -- as with all visions that render one speechless or stammering out calls to the divine, Petit's act should not be placed so quickly in a simplistic narrative, the director's reticence seems to remind us. Sometimes <i>why</i> is just … the wrong question. </p>
<p>Concerned as he is with <i>how</i> rather than <i>why</i>, Marsh stages witty reconstructions of Petit and his friends' plot. The director isn't focused on verisimilitude, but on demonstrating the dramatic tension that fueled Petit's act. The group of friends that planned the coup was plagued by technical difficulties -- how to get the wire from one tower to another, stabilize it, smuggle in nearly a ton of equipment, cope with the twisting winds. The act was a potential suicide play, and the group was wracked with fear and conflict -- in the end, the friends' bond couldn't withstand the fruition of its galvanizing goal, nor Petit's subsequent fame. </p>
<p>Marsh doesn't shy away from Petit's obsessiveness, or the narcissism that leads the tightrope walker to sleep with an admirer after staging his grand show, ignoring both his devoted girlfriend Annie and his friends. To the camera, Petit speaks of the need for artistic rebellion -- against rules and definitions, and against one's own success. That he failed in this last doesn't damn him -- Marsh refuses to editorialize in this or other matters -- but renders the artist as complex as his work. </p>
<p>The film sketches a similarly nuanced portrait of Petit's pre-WTC walk on a wire strung across the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral. He struts to and fro, seems to sleep like a man in a hammock. When Annie rushes into the church, she finds the priests in the midst of a ritual, face down on the floor. Here, a lesser film might hammer home a secular stake -- the institutions of divinity are oblivious to human miracles. But Annie recalls the response of one of the men -- "Ah, how wonderful!" This moment, as much as the treatment of Petit's WTC walk, shows both the priests' and Petit's dedication to a sense of wonder, and to seeking a state of grace. They exist in a harmonic tension with each other -- the members of the institution and the iconoclast, face down in devotion and face up in defiance. </p>
<p>That tension finds its ultimate climax in Petit's WTC walk -- a lone man on a wire, rigged up by an invisible team and the unseen heroics of a forgotten friend; a refutation of gravity and time that is bound to it. In depicting this tension so fully, <i>Man on Wire</i> offers the best homage to the World Trade Center towers that I've seen: a revelation that remembers -- and dares to imagine -- something other than their destruction. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:28:30 +0000147542 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewBeverly Illshttps://prospect.org/article/beverly-ills
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Remember the first day of school? Blundering around lost, filled with a sense of unseen peril, hot dread, and anticipation? For those of us too old or too traumatized to remember, the CW's thrown together a refresher course that will evoke all those emotions -- <i>90210</i>. </p>
<p>Not that <i>90210</i> will have much resemblance to most Americans' high school experience. <i>90210</i>, which premiered Sept. 2, is a vulgar little thing -- it tries too hard, changing subplots and personalities like outfits. Part of the problem may be classic pilot-itis, of course, wherein producers trot out their glossy casts and buzziest storylines in the hopes of avoiding a gruesome end. But the pilot also hearkened back to an earlier time -- the dreary first days of the original <i>Beverly Hills, 90210, </i>which ran in the 1990s on the Fox network. </p>
<p>I just moved back to the States from several years in Thailand, so hearing that <i>90210</i> had risen from the ashes was the perfect welcome home. Any ex-expat has a certain fear of being outed as an anachronistic freak, and I made a few slip-ups by gawking at the new Pringles flavors in the grocery store, etc. But I had avoided full-on hazing until I flounced into my friend Randy's living room and asked, "Who is this … Miley Cyrus?" </p>
<p>The look on his face was familiar to me from watching <i>Borat</i> on a crappy pirated DVD off the streets of Patpong (I didn't buy it! I swear!) -- a combination of incredulity, horrified amusement, and <i>awwww, we have to be nice to the foreigner</i>. After hearing of this incident, our friend Aaron yelled out the title I had earned by adding cultural ignorance to my pre-existing problems with loud, inappropriate conversation and loud, inappropriate outfits. </p>
<p>"Drag-queen exchange student!" I cowered by the toaster. "First, you're getting rid of those leopard-print platforms. And then we are gonna put you in re-education camp. It's going to be exhaustive -- and <i>exhausting</i>." </p>
<p>We began with <i>Project Runway</i>. Then <i>Sex and the City</i> -- just a refresher to get the rhythm of bitchy banter and syrupy sweetness back. I learned how to work TiVo, and watched <i>Dark Knight</i> and a series of YouTube videos of people and babies vomiting, falling down, or getting kicked in the head by break dancers. I felt like Rocky Balboa punching cow carcasses in a slaughterhouse. In the midst of this training montage -- some smart cuts and fancy editing are required to make screeching on the couch look exciting -- insert the one ray of light: the prospect of a reincarnated <i>90210</i>. </p>
<p>I knew the show's venerable predecessor, thanks to being <i>old</i>, as Aaron liked to remind me. At one low, unemployed point in my life, I watched two hours of <i>Beverly Hills, 90210</i> reruns a day. I also liked the trashy glories of Aaron Spelling's other baby, Melrose Place --- remember when Kimberly <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICyYiJiDGN0">takes her wig off</a>? But there was something so reassuring about the <i>90210</i> universe. It was so hip to be square, and no matter how hard it tried to be risqué -- drug abuse! Teenage pregnancy! -- it couldn't scrub off the smell of eau d'afterschool special. For all its cattiness and feints at social relevance, the original was sort of sweet in its soapiness -- a drama about the cool people that, by dint of its deep dorkiness, showed that they were just people, too. </p>
<p><i>90210</i>'s current incarnation is not so different -- but its viewers are. Thanks to being <i>old</i>, I'm more aware of the tick-tock of mortality and of my reluctance to watch TV tartlets pout and mince when I could be looking for grey hairs. <i>90210</i>'s producers are desperate to tap the nostalgia factor for the post-teen set. The producers have cast the old show's queens in supporting roles. Popular girl Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth) is now a guidance counselor at her alma mater, and <i>enfant terrible</i> Brenda Walsh (played by <i>actor terrible</i> Shannen Doherty) has returned to, what? Wreak more romantic havoc? Storm off the set in real life? The producers hope we are rubbing our hands in anticipation. </p>
<p>The set-up of the new <i>90201</i> is the same -- nice Midwestern family moves to Beverly Hills and is confronted by the silicone stylings of the natives. But the producers have tried tweaking the white-bread formula a bit. Instead of the Walsh twins, Annie (Shanae Grimes, clearly the valedictorian of the Renee Zellweger School of Method Squinting) and her adopted African American brother Dixon Wilson (Tristan Wilds, wasted in an underwritten part) are the stars, in a nod to the world outside of TV. And the one in it, too -- the adopted bit seems reminiscent of the adoption of "class outsider" Ryan by an affluent family in <i>The OC</i>. </p>
<p>In fact, most of the new elements seem stolen from other shows or movies -- there's a blow-job scene in the car that's a sad grab at the <i>Gossip Girl</i> audience, alpha-female Naomi is just a <i>Mean Girl</i>, nerdy Navin is a knock-off <i>OC</i> Seth. The characters' dilemmas have old-fogey concern written all over them, along with old-fogey writing -- drugs are hidden in a cut-up schoolbook, Naomi cheats on an English paper -- and attempts to bring the show up-to-date with tattling text messages and taunting blog storylines show just how archaic it is at its core. Everything feels tired -- <i>dated</i>, dare I say -- even the young cast members, who make little impression outside of their terrifyingly white smiles. Has the fluoride in L.A. been irradiated or something? Too much. </p>
<p>The much-courted nostalgia factor is an unstable element -- it could actually wind up driving viewers away. We were in love with the older sister and don't want anything to do with this mawkish colt, dressed up in borrowed clothing. The original suffered from the same problems in the beginning -- the welter of subplots, the cheesy moralizing -- but I find myself so attached to the first series that I have a decreased patience for this even more plastic and derivative incarnation. I mean, I loved Brenda's hideous <a href="http://selenaporsiempre.forumup.org/about2918-selenaporsiempre.html">black-and-white Spring Dance dress</a> that she wore to consummate her love with bad-boy Dylan (Kelly wore the same dress that night, cue meowfest!) . I loved Donna Martin graduating. I loved dorky Andrea, beacon of hope and social acceptance for dorks worldwide. But most of all, I loved Kelly's finest moment, where she's choosing between Dylan and his sideburns and Brandon and his mousse-hardened Lego hair: "I choose … me," she declares, and walks away from them both. Let us take a line from Kelly -- it's time to walk away. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:23:09 +0000147439 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewModern Pressures on a Prized Ecosystemhttps://prospect.org/article/modern-pressures-prized-ecosystem
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Claustrophobes beware -- every October or November, millions of Cambodians jam into their capital city, Phnom Penh, for a riotous three-day water festival, clogging the riverside boulevard that runs in front of the royal palace. Although Bon Om Touk is much beloved for providing opportunities to watch boat races, slurp fertilized duck eggs, and indulge in flirtation, the festival celebrates historic Khmer maritime prowess and an even older phenomenon -- the reversal of the flow of the Tonle Sap Lake. This switch brings streams of fish that provide 60 percent of the country's overall inland catch. The fish are swiftly transformed into everything from porridge to prahoc, an undyingly pungent fermented fish paste that keeps extremely well and serves as the major source of animal protein for the country's rural poor. </p>
<p>Although prahoc is forever, its source may not be, say environmentalists and activists increasingly concerned with the explosion of hydropower development on the region's waterways. To date, at least 82 hydropower projects exist in the wider Mekong region, and 179 more are identified as potential sites. Environmentalists argue that the development is haphazardly regulated at best -- largely fueled by quiet deals between private enterprise and government officials -- and worsened by a lack of political will to create and enforce national and transboundary environmental standards and open up the development process to public scrutiny. </p>
<p>Development at this pace could have a massive impact on the region. The longest river in Southeast Asia, the Mekong originates in the Tibetan highlands, crashes through the gorges of Yunnan in southern China, and runs through Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia before emptying into the South China Sea through its delta, otherwise known as the "rice basket" of Vietnam. In addition to providing valuable transportation and trade routes, the river and its "flood pulse" of seasonally triggered changes help maintain the delta's balance of fresh- and seawater and fuel the largest inland fishery in the world, providing 2.6 million tons of fish, currently valued at $2 billion a year. </p>
<p>The Mekong and other rivers in mainland Southeast Asia also offer a huge source of hydropower potential, largely being tapped by private-sector investors cutting direct deals with powerful individuals within national governments. According to a technical report put out by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the Mekong River Commission (MRC), many of these projects appear to be funded by Chinese consortiums that haven't signed on to the Equator Principles, a set of environmentally and socially responsible guidelines that have been adopted by many of the world's largest private financial institutions. This dearth of environmental standards and a lack of transparency endangers both the area's river system and the rural poor who rely on it for their livelihood. </p>
<p>"Governments need to make informed decisions about whether to proceed with projects," says John Dore, program director of the Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience (M-Power), a network dedicated to improving water governance in the region. "Most strikingly there is a complete absence of informed discussion about the pros and cons of the mainstream dams and diversions in lower Mekong countries that have re-emerged on the agendas of national governments and ... developers." </p>
<p>In November 2007, a coalition of more than 200 environmental groups sent an open letter questioning the efficacy and basis for international funding of the Mekong River Commission. The MRC was formed in 1995 when the governments of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand signed an agreement governing joint management of their shared water and development of the economic potential of the river. The environmentalists' letter criticized the MRC's silence on revived plans for six dams on the lower Mekong's mainstream in Cambodia, Laos, and the Lao-Thai border. Originally drafted in 1994, these plans were later scrapped after civil-society organizations protested that the dams would be too costly and environmentally destructive. Emboldened by China's partially completed, huge cascade of dams on the mainstream to the north, and flush with new capital, however, governments in the lower Mekong are eager to explore mainstream damming options. Environmentalists argue that two of the projects would severely affect key migratory channels for fish moving from Cambodia to Laos. Attempts to mitigate blockages of these channels have included the last-minute construction of fish ladders, which have proven almost entirely ineffective. Unlike wild salmon, Mekong river fish don't jump. </p>
<p>The region's ecosystems have already seen disturbing impacts from damming. In 2004, water-level lows on the Mekong River and Tonle Sap Lake, erratic river flows, and sharp decreases in the fish catch had scientists, fishing communities, and activists questioning whether China's massive new hydroelectric dams on the mainstream to the north, in tandem with a drought, may have played a role in the waterways' bizarre fluctuations that year. While opinions vary about the impact of the Chinese dams, most analysis suggests that they adversely affect dry-season flows and prevent sediments vital to farmers from flowing downstream. </p>
<p>"The Mekong countries build dams and sell power," says Richard Cronin, a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Stimson Center. "But how much money is enough to compensate for potentially destroying the basic security and basic food security of 60 million people?" This question is frequently put to the MRC, the only body specifically created to help balance economic development of the Mekong with social and environmental protections. Some environmentalists have found the MRC's responses less than satisfactory. </p>
<p>"The MRC is a paper tiger," says Premrudee Daoroung, director of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, the NGO that initiated the 2007 letter. The upper Mekong countries of China and Myanmar are MRC observers, not signatories, and are not required to release information about their hydropower projects -- or to consult the other countries downstream through the MRC. In addition, the MRC is an intergovernmental body with no enforcement "teeth" to thoroughly vet proposed projects, Daoroung says. </p>
<p>Observers elsewhere argue that the MRC and other hydropower stakeholders can evolve toward a more sustainable development policy. Javed Mir, an ADB natural resources specialist, says, "Most of these countries were at each others' throats. To have an agreement in 1995 ... that we are interdependent and communicate with each other is a significant achievement." The ADB, WWF, and World Bank are now working with national governments and private-sector actors to draft environmental "considerations" that can be applied early on in the project consideration process. M-Power has launched large public forums including stakeholders from each sphere to encourage open dialogue on river development. </p>
<p>Despite these commendable efforts, environmentalists recognize the huge challenge that lies ahead of them -- addressing not only the hydropower issue but the political and economic systems that have made the development decision-making process such a closed one. "We are fighting against the tide, I know," says the WWF's Marc Goichot. "Projects are happening very fast, and this is a long process." </p>
<p>Lest future revelers at Bon Om Touk find themselves with less to celebrate, one can only hope that the Mekong Basin's multiple planners will somehow agree to respect the broad principles of ecosystem management -- and keep the miracle alive.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 23 May 2008 23:20:14 +0000147232 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewThe Middle Age of Wong Kar-Waihttps://prospect.org/article/middle-age-wong-kar-wai
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Wong Kar-Wai is cursed by the sort of foamingly mad fans who will keep a filmmaker treed for life. As one of this barking group, I'd say that the devotion is inspired by both the Hong Kong director's unmistakable visual language and by his capacity as an expert chronicler of romantic alienation. Couple Wong's obsessive attention to stylistic detail -- aching slow-mo, ravishingly saturated color palettes and costume design, all set to the naked confession of pop songs -- with the immortal rhythms of romance gone wrong, and it's no surprise that Wong's work would inspire the vigilance of a jealous lover: <i>He's mine</i>! </p>
<p>Wong fans have been working up pleasurable, proprietary rage at the director's latest film <i>My Blueberry Nights</i>, also his first English-language feature. But the thing is too slight a confection to merit the fury -- how mad can you get at such deliberate inoffensiveness? It's like trying to burn Norah Jones, <i>Blueberry</i>'s erstwhile star, at the stake. That Wong has cast the adult-contemporary crooner as the lead is a cue to just how atmospherically innocuous and contentedly middle-aged this film feels. Instead of boiling bunnies or incinerating his car, irked fans should just eye the door while singing that ditty about the old gray mare under their breaths. </p>
<p>Wong ain't been what he used to be for a while now. Gone are the days of being wild -- Leslie Cheung screeching like a holy terror in <i>Happy Together</i>, the gun fights or flash martial-arts moves of <i>As Tears Go By</i> and <i>Ashes of Time</i>, Faye Wong wrestling a giant Garfield stuffed animal and jumping on the bed in <i>Chungking Express</i>. Wong has always dealt with the same thematic material, but he just used to have more energy about it than he does now. His obsessions: the asymptotic almost, the shattered lovers who turn too quickly to others, the people on rising and falling trajectories, going the wrong direction, at the wrong time, trapped in the wake of personal and political history. Like the mournful cop who talks to cans of pineapple in <i>Chungking Express</i>, Wong's characters were always looking for love without an expiration date, and failing miserably. </p>
<p>And gorgeously as well. Wong turned from sped-up film to more slow-mo shots with <i>In the Mood for Love</i>, his best-known and most critically acclaimed film. This story of repressed love plays out like torturous filmic foreplay, the kind without climax. Wong had always been fond of replaying snippets of music and variations of scenes, of featuring recurring characters over the course of several movies -- in <i>In the Mood</i>, Wong made ample use of these techniques to create a sumptuously smothering vision. <i>In the Mood</i> is perfect feel-bad fare for the freshly dumped or the hit-and-run victims of unrequited love -- nobody is more self-centered and self-referential than those cast out of affection, and no one is more eager to see heartbreak turned into haute couture. "Turns out all lonely people are the same," as one character says in his desolate <i>Happy Together</i> (the protagonists are neither happy, nor are they together), and what pining-prone viewer wouldn't want to identify with Wong's stunning stars and their sadness? </p>
<p><i>In the Mood</i> distilled Wong's talents but abandoned the antic, strange verve that kept his work from becoming inert -- it was so beautiful, however, that most fans found it a fair trade-off. Sadly, Wong's follow-up <i>2046</i> tipped into onanism, with Tony Leung writing about writing, and sleeping with many to forget the one, and on and on in a complacent, self-indulgent dirge. Wong loves to play with time -- perhaps the scene that best captures the delicious tension in his films is from <i>Chungking Express</i>, where Wong films a brooding cop drinking coffee in half motion as everything around him zips forward in triple time. The scene is a perfect evocation of the internal landscape of the lovelorn -- stuck in the past and buffeted by the onward-rushing present. But in <i>2046</i>, Wong slowed down his film so much that he lost the energy he generated from alternating narrative slack and speed, a problem that also afflicts his syrupy <i>My Blueberry Nights</i>. </p>
<p><i>My Blueberry Nights</i> begins with familiar romantic turmoil -- Elizabeth (Jones) is coping with the aftermath of a messy breakup. Her main confidant is Jeremy, a messy-haired, charming English expatriate (that hambone Jude Law) who runs an improbably cute coffee shop -- they bond, night after night, over leftover blueberry pie and ice cream. </p>
<p>Wong supplies a bit of narrative tension by sending Elizabeth on the road on a heal-thyself journey, from which she writes postcards to the besotted Jeremy. She lands in Memphis, taking in the honky-tonk heartbreak between a drunken cop and his estranged, saucy-britches wife -- David Straitharn and Rachel Weisz put in a game effort, but their storyline comes across as an overheated vignette rather than a real character study. Elizabeth then heads on to Nevada, where Natalie Portman gives the film a good jolt as a poodle-permed, frosted-blonde poker player with a whole deck of lies up her sleeve. Portman is brash, loud, cocky but with wounded eyes, and unfortunately for Wong, she shows just how lifeless <i>Blueberry</i> is, along with its affect-free star, who seems to have been chosen on purely aesthetic grounds. Jones sleepwalks through the film -- indeed the best part of her performance may be when Elizabeth is sleeping and Jeremy kisses the remains of a blueberry-pie feast off her lips. </p>
<p>Yawn. </p>
<p><i>Blueberry</i> is buffed to a high sheen -- Wong has replaced his brocaded Chinoiserie with a glossy version of Americana, as if the art director for Rolex had been commissioned to make ads in picturesque diners along Route 50. Despite its relentless luxe prettiness, <i>Blueberry</i> manages to be both thin and talky. Contrast this to <i>In the Mood</i> where the power of Wong's visual language runs in counterpart to his characters' relative reticence -- his camera reveals everything its subjects cannot. Maggie Cheung's Mrs. Su, for example, is an exquisite, two-part creature -- her impeccable manners are belied by her wardrobe's Expressionistic colors, the way her cheongsam cling to her body, so many sighs turned to silk. Leung's long-suffering Mr. Chow can't express his love for Mrs. Su, so instead he's always shown with a cigarette, the exhaled smoke showing the secret, burning shape of his soul. </p>
<p>Much of the appeal of Wong's films lies in just this reticence, in their fragmentation and empty spaces. They're structured with holes, much like the one in a wall at Angkor Wat into which Mr. Chow whispers the tale of his secret love -- holes that allow the projection of the viewer's own interpretive sadness. In stark contrast, the <i>Blueberry</i>-era Wong lets Elizabeth and Jeremy patter on in the most banal fashion <i>and</i> illustrates the so-called sensuality of their connection with porny shots of ice cream sliding into blueberry-pie filling, lit by smeary red neon lighting, ad nauseum. When Wong quoted from the <i>In the Mood</i> soundtrack -- he recasts an iconic piece of music ("Yumeji's Theme") from that film for his new, paper-doll couple -- I grumbled into my popcorn and looked at my watch. Who cares if they'll have any more blueberry kisses? </p>
<p>Perhaps it's unfair to ask the master of sepia sentiments to make something new. Yet that's exactly what he used to do -- his films were fueled by a live-wire vitality even as they mourned the passing of the past, married overripe visuals with spare dialogue, and captured moments of intense and particular emotion in a universal pop vernacular. Pining over the loss of the director's new-wave nostalgia -- a very Wong emotion, that. But Wong needs to recover the energy that charged his slow-mo shots and exquisite art-direction with such electricity. Because if he doesn't ? Well, we just might pick ourselves off the floor, wipe our eyes -- and get over him at last. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:45:57 +0000147134 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewFinding a Moral Centerhttps://prospect.org/article/finding-moral-center
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The opening of Cristian Mungiu's <i>4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days</i> demands much by showing little. A half-full fish tank. Rising smoke. Clutter sprawled on a kitchen table. A hand reaches in, taps ash off the end of a cigarette, withdraws. This strange still life is viewed from a static mid-level position, through a gaze as dispassionate as that of a security camera. In this film, the opening says, it's the background that counts. </p>
<p>That first scene seems surprisingly quiet for a work that, after it won the <i>Palme d'Or</i> at last year's Cannes festival, became known as "that Romanian film about abortion" -- a summation that seemed to reflect distaste for both critic favorites of obscure origin and heavy-breathing issue films. What's the next country with a freshly anointed "new wave?" And what daring sociopolitical issue will it tackle? Cynical art-house audiences were flapping their hands in horror. </p>
<p>Anyone watching <i>4 Months</i>, however, will heave a sigh of relief that the film does not mug viewers for votes, nor does it read like a pile of field notes from an inscrutable land. <i>4 Months</i> is staunchly non-polemical, its story inextricable from everyday details filmed with a stylized realism. The opening frames show little of what a more conventional film might depict in its establishing shots -- character, a distinct sense of place, a "beginning" to the story. But the scene's symbolic substance is made nearly too explicit through the fish tank and the disembodied hand holding a cigarette -- <i>4 Months</i> traces the claustrophobia and alienation of relationships in a rotting system in a cinematic language as harsh as it is effective. </p>
<p>The lonely hand in the first frames belongs to Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a mousily pretty tech student, jittery over her upcoming -- and illegal -- abortion. <i>4 Months</i> is set in 1987, two years before the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, who established the devastating Decree 770 when he came to power in 1966. Determined to produce the booming population that could turn Romania into an industrial force, the dictator banned contraception and abortion for women under 40 who had not given birth to at least four children. Birthrates soared -- and so did the number of illegal abortions. Maternal mortality rates increased dramatically under Ceausescu, with illegal abortions accounting for more than 80 percent of the deaths. </p>
<p>Mungiu doesn't provide any of this backstory or political details about oppression under Ceausescu -- he doesn't need to. As with the opening shots, the story lies in the unexplained details: gas cut off in the evenings, the thriving black market trading in everything from cigarettes to Tic-Tacs, and particularly in the taut fear on the faces of Gabita and her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who has taken charge of her friend's dangerous mission. </p>
<p>In the 24-hour time frame of the film, Otilia runs a gauntlet of extreme risk and everyday humiliation, and it's difficult to say which will kill her first. She has to contend with casually cruel hotel clerks, a well-off boyfriend who demands her attendance at a family function, and worst of all -- the childish, piping Gabita and the brutish abortionist with the unironic name of Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). </p>
<p>Mungiu doesn't excuse his characters for their behavior, but he's not interested in making paper villains out of the worst ones either. The sadistic hotel clerks don't know when their wages are coming through; Mr. Bebe is trying to deal with a querulous mother. Human relations reflect the perversions of the system -- even Mr. Bebe's vicious song-and-dance reveals his belief that his clients will play him for a fool. </p>
<p>What to make of Otilia, then? She rivets the film with her clenched-jaw selflessness, a stoicism that makes her attempts to hold on to her humanity all the more heroic. At the end of her hellish day, Otilia surely deserves a respite, or someone else to lean on, or even the relief of a breakdown. She denies herself the luxury of all these things, declaring to her boyfriend, "Don't worry, I won't rely on you." In lesser mouths, this might be a plea for rescue; from Otilia, it's just a bitter recognition that in her world, on this day at least, there is no one coming to save her, except herself. </p>
<p><i>4 Months</i> moves with the mounting dread of a thriller, but still pauses long enough for moments that telegraph eternities: the way Gabita and Otilia crank on the faucets to drown out a nasty past or an even more monstrous present, the way that Otilia craves only Kent cigarettes but can't find a single one. The film's centerpiece is a masterful one -- a study in stillness, where nothing happens and everything does. Otilia has made it to her boyfriend's house, and is seated at the dinner table, surrounded by guests relishing the bluff insularity of their money and privilege. Disembodied hands dart in and out of the frame and conversation swirls around her -- she is only sitting, and yet we can't take our eyes off of her, a lifetime told in silence. </p>
<p>Mungiu ends his film with yet another scene at a table -- perhaps the only time he drops his admirable restraint. A plate of offal is placed on the table, a metaphor more heavy-handed than the opening image of the fish tank, and an unnecessary one. Mungiu has already made clear that almost everything in the world of <i>4 Months</i> is dead, to be consumed or disposed of as necessary. Far more interesting is the question he seems to pose at the beginning -- in such a world, what will you become? Boneless like Gabita, malignant like Mr. Bebe, fat on favors like the dinner-party guests? Or someone else entirely? For all its seeming grimness, <i>4 Months</i> is oddly optimistic in its imagining of Otilia -- that lone figure in the background, the silent moral center in a world that has fallen apart. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:47:17 +0000146960 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewThe Illusion of Escapehttps://prospect.org/article/illusion-escape
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Stories that others tell us about ourselves can be seductive in their certainty -- they provide distraction, delicious and damning, from the burden of figuring out our own. Jessica Yu's curious documentary <i>Protagonist</i> is an exploration of extremism, but its stylistic framework provides a more puzzling and provocative question: What is the power of language and narrative in shaping the self? </p>
<p>Originally commissioned by the Carr Foundation to direct a documentary on the Greek playwright Euripides, Yu decided to bring the tragedian's themes to contemporary light. Over the course of eight months, Yu and her producers sought out individuals whose lives seemed to follow the trajectory of Euripides' tragic extremists -- heroes whose righteous quests led to fanaticism. Yu means for her viewers to have a meta-ponder -- she just about bonks us on the head with intertitles suggesting different themes: Character. Catharsis. Resolution. </p>
<p><i>Protagonist</i> draws on the fascinating stories of four men: a leftist-terrorist from Germany, a devout "ex-gay" missionary determined to exorcise homosexuality from his and others' lives, a stick-up artist who knocked over more than 30 banks, and a young man in thrall to an abusive martial-arts master. Yu cuts together their narratives according to a Euripides-esque story arc and punctuates the men's monologues with unusual interludes -- rod-puppet restagings of the playwright's work, most notably <i>The Bacchae</i>. This last touch would be more art-school-than-thou if it weren't for the puppets' bizarre expressiveness, which mirrors the dramatic way <i>Protagonist</i>'s subjects recount the events of their lives. </p>
<p>Hans-Joachim Klein was born to a Jewish concentration-camp survivor who committed suicide when Klein was just a child. Klein turned against his father -- a violent policeman and Nazi sympathizer -- and sought out leftist causes, eventually becoming a "high on rage" berserker who participated in the high-profile kidnapping of OPEC ministers and the Entebbe hijacking in 1976. </p>
<p>Mark Piermont's family hewed to a harsh Christianity -- the kind where Christ's compassion did not extend to boys who cry. As a young man, Piermont turned to the church to purge him of the "sin" of his homosexual desires and went so far as to serve as a missionary all over the world, marry, and have a son. </p>
<p>Joe Loya also grew up in a religious household, but one headed by a father who subjected his sons to unrelenting violence until Loya stabbed him near-fatally in the neck. Loya embarked upon a life of crime after that, terming himself an Ubermenschian "religious fanatic for evil." </p>
<p>During his childhood, Yu's husband and <i>Iron &amp; Silk</i> memoirist Mark Salzman was constantly set upon by bullies, until he discovered the allure of an explosive martial-arts master who made his young charges put grapes in foam mannequin heads so the boys could practice poking out opponents' eyes. </p>
<p><i>Protagonist</i>'s subjects are a fearsomely eloquent lot. Aside from the narrative commonalities Yu delineates with her sharp editing and intertitled chapters, the men share some provocative psychological patterns in their "extreme" periods: ferociously dualistic thinking, a totalizing need for control and certainty, the search for what Salzman calls "a philosophical framework that made me at ease in every situation in life." They are the houses that reaction-formation built. </p>
<p>Until each of them face a wrenching realization of what they have become, the men are in thrall to the illusion of escape, without realizing that what we escape to is inextricably tied to what we are escaping from. Like a dog on a leash who can only run in a circle, each of the men are fleeing a sense of powerlessness and suffering, but wind up trapped in the same pattern from which he sought escape. Worse, even, because each one becomes that which he fears the most. What better way to deny that one is at the whim of a cruel and quixotic god (or father or bully) than to try to become one? </p>
<p>All of the men are now writers and performers, which perhaps accounts for the unflinching regard with which they examine their own lives. Each comes across powerfully – Klein's keen gaze under his wild hair, Piermont's sadly expressive eyes, Loya's genial charm and knack for vivid turns of phrase, and Salzman's terrific energy and humor. They manage to animate a film that seems oddly static at points, for all the high drama of its subjects' plunges into extremism and moments of reversal. </p>
<p>Much of the staged quality results from Yu's narrative inspiration -- Euripides himself was no stranger to clunking deus ex machina endings and perambulatory prologues. But at times, even her subjects' talent for self-reflection stifles the unsettling, unknowable questions that such a documentary should pose. To some extent, the story arc and the men's retellings are almost too neat and pre-chewed for a film unusual enough to feature puppet stagings of ancient Greek tragedy. </p>
<p>Yu's tidy thematic narrative doesn't allow an examination of the elements in the men's childhoods that might lead them <i>out</i> of extremism, for example, even as the motivations <i>into</i> radicalism are almost over-explained. For all its subjects' insistence on the perils of overly dualistic thinking, <i>Protagonist</i> indulges in a little of that itself, and its tightly shaped thematic chapters can hamper viewers' efforts to structure or create their own narratives about the men's lives. Yu's film raises inadvertent questions, perhaps: How much of the self can or should be told as a coherent story? How do we tell a story of who we are that is full, elastic, and respectful of the stories others tell about their lives? And how do we tell the story of who others are to us? </p>
<p>Although the film's structure can occasionally lend itself to airless overdeterminacy, <i>Protagonist</i> is for the most part a compelling character study of estrangement, extremism and epiphany towards more complicated truths. If <i>Protagonist</i> allowed in a bit more doubt and uncertainty, it might have embodied the hard-won awareness that "all I know is that I don't know," as Klein puts it -- and made the leap from an excellent film to an unanswerable, unforgettable one. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:45:49 +0000146858 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewBergman's Twilight Room of the Soulhttps://prospect.org/article/bergmans-twilight-room-soul
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p><i>Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster -- a movement.</i> <br />
<br />
-- Ingmar Bergman, <i>Laterna Magica</i> (1987); <i>The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography as translated by Joan Tate</i> (1988)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><center>- - -</center>
<p>Swedish director Ingmar Bergman died Monday, as did Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and their obituaries were as much eulogies for the revered directors as laments for the state of cinema today. I'll pile on, with the old-farty, secretly satisfied grumpiness that is the critic's default emotional setting, and say that films today seem to have less ambitious goals than they did in years past. I'm not sure why exactly. Is it postmodern erosion of the notion of universal questions? Or are we at the next step in the progression from religious art, to philosophical art to our art of a splintered world?
</p>
<p>Whatever the case, at their best, films now are small gems, a peek through a keyhole. At their worst, they are dragged down by partisanship, sequel-itis, and fracture -- our contemporary obsessions with conspiracy and sound-bites provide more modest revelations than those wrought by the earlier cinematic motivations of religious awe or philosophical doubt. </p>
<p>Perhaps Antonioni and Bergman would find it ironic that their deaths would link them, considering their famous distaste for each other. But they had more in common than they would have liked to admit -- they were unabashed peddlers of the philosophical, ponderers of the meaning of existence and threadbare faith, although in two opposing modes. Antonioni's films were centered on tableaux -- he was an architect of alienation, and his long takes of landscapes speak of the vast distances between his characters. His aestheticized ennui has inspired countless filmmakers, particularly Asian ones -- Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-Wai, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien owe much of their melancholy to the maestro, as his adherents call him. </p>
<p>Bergman, however, was perhaps more obsessed with fusion than dissolution. His films visit and revisit the terror of merger -- and the obstinate isolation of the self -- with a restless rhythm. In a movement counter to that of Antonioni, he zoomed in so intently on his actors' faces that they become immense, alien landscapes. With its fierce acting and high drama, his work seems like silent film... with speech. Where Antonioni ran cool, Bergman was overheated -- so much so that in one of his finest works, <i>Persona</i>, the film itself seems to burst into flames. </p>
<p>Bergman is not so <i>en vogue</i> now, although you wouldn't be able to tell from all the encomia in the air. His characters are too hair-rendingly emotional about the big imponderables. Antonioni's work focused on these, too, but took a tone more in keeping with our contemporary esteem for ironic detachment. </p>
<p>Because watching Bergman is such a personal affair, it seems appropriate that he would dominate this very piece, as I write it. Being slighted would result in a <i>Dies Irae</i> from Bergman, and perhaps a locked door from Antonioni. I'll take the latter, not only out of fear, but because Bergman led to Antonioni for me as a film-lover -- the Swede was my first real introduction to more abstract film. </p>
<p>I already had a passing acquaintance with one of his characters, like many other filmgoers of a certain age. We know Death well. Ghoulishly garbed and white-faced, he looks like a mime who has come to beat you down in the back alley of your dreams. He also plays chess and has stinky feet -- and we learned all this from <i>Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey</i>. </p>
<p>I didn't figure out that the figure of Death was a cinematic quotation from <i>The Seventh Seal</i> until I watched much of Bergman's oeuvre in college. For someone who grew up on the offerings of the Milan (Illinois) Showcase Theater, surrounded by cornfields and cows and silos, Bergman was a shock. Ticking clocks! Holy non-linearity! All that shrieking! </p>
<p><i>Persona</i> was a particular pill. I didn't get it, but instead of being intrigued, I was irritated. I preferred the rich, humanistic dream symbolism of <i>Wild Strawberries</i>, the relatively straightforward narratives of <i>Scenes from a Marriage</i> and <i>Fanny and Alexander</i>. I reacted to <i>Persona</i>'s visual freak-outs, the violent rupture of idyll, and the obstinate blurring of storyline with fierce eye-rolling and a crack about some of the scenes' resemblance to a Calvin Klein ad. </p>
<p>In homage to Bergman's preoccupation with mortality and time (tick tick tick!), I decided to revisit <i>Persona</i> this week. And while I still don't get it, I appreciate it much more. A warped <i>pas de deux</i> between young nurse Alma and her charge, the willfully mute actress Elisabet, the film confounds narrative and elides dream and reality, past and present. It's a perverse blurring, but also a purposeful one, for Bergman seems to tear at the limitations of representation itself. </p>
<p>He brackets the film with shots of a carbon-arc lamp, used in film projectors of the time, a portion of leader, and a slew of images -- a cartoon, corpses, an erect penis, a hand writhing as a spike is hammered through it. This is a conjured film, the meta-frame seems to say, not a piece of reality captured in the objective eye of the camera. </p>
<p>Alma fills the vacuum of silence with increasingly personal revelations, until she faces a psychic betrayal -- and here Bergman out-Brechts Brecht by shattering the image of Alma's face like a mirror, and then creates the effect of burning through the film entirely. The film itself has melted from the heat of its own images, from its attempt to depict the unknowable -- the face behind the mask, the interior of a person that remains hidden no matter how vampiric the merger. </p>
<p><i>Persona</i> is a strange Möbius strip. It seems Bergman attempted to depict not only the psychological fusion of two women, but the act of seeing, or subjectivity, itself. The film features titanic close-ups of his actresses' faces. At one point, Bergman melds them together to make an awful, asymmetrical image, and forces it on his own Elisabet -- us, the silent observers. </p>
<p>As <i>Persona</i> suggests, watching a lot of Bergman films is a bit like snacking on glass, and his style (the delirious Mozartian shenanigans of <i>Smiles of Summer Night</i> and his adaptation of that composer's <i>The Magic Flute</i> aside) is thumpingly humorless and prone to parody, as Bill and Ted could attest. But as dated as it may seem, his work is unforgettable for its immense ambition and its mystery, the sense of audacious irresolution that so irked me before about <i>Persona</i>, and compels me now. Bergman offered little reassurance when he questioned the meaning of existence, and depicted the silence or malevolence of god -- save for glimpses of human love and comfort. </p>
<p>Like any other great filmmaker, Bergman drew on contradictions. He exploited our eyes' inability to perceive darkness in between frames to show emotional darkness, ran a slurry of stills and faces together to create the grand illusion of movement and merger. But Bergman's films are paradoxical in yet another way. His work is almost toxically solipsistic -- not surprising, considering one of the filmmaker's first memories was of being locked in a dark closet for hours by his stern minister father. His films drag us, too, into the night of his mind, the darkened vault of the theater, and confronts us with the unknowable reasons of why we suffer -- a subjective mining of a universal condition. </p>
<p>"I hope I never get so old I get religious," Bergman once said. It was a caustic wish, but he was never one for answers, including those offered by faith. Perhaps the best way to think of his last real-life scenes is to remember the fateful chess match between Death and the doubt-wracked knight in <i>The Seventh Seal</i>. The knight knows he will lose -- Death is a cheater who has never been defeated. But all that's left to do is play the game, step by step, to buy the rest of us more time.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:47:43 +0000146505 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewManufacturing Arthttps://prospect.org/article/manufacturing-art
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Rendered in exquisite calligraphic brushwork and soaring white space, many later-era Chinese landscape paintings depict both the artist's interior terrain and the visible world. Artist Edward Burtynsky's photographs of industrial wastelands work the same way, even though their disturbing beauty inverts the pristine ideal by drawing on mountains of rubble and polluted rivers.</p>
<p>The subject of a new documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, <a href="http://www.mongrelmedia.com/films/ManufacturedLandscapes.html"><i>Manufactured Landscapes</i></a>, Burtynsky takes the art form that graces hotel walls and doctors' offices and gives it bite – the pastoral, poisoned. <i><br /></i></p>
<p> <a href="http://www.mongrelmedia.com/films/ManufacturedLandscapes.html"><img border="1" align="left" space="10" src="/galleries/img_articles/07.05.07.thrupkaew.jpg" alt="" /></a> </p>
<p><i>Landscapes</i> is set almost entirely in China -- "the world's factory," as Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang termed the country recently, in response to a report that China is now the largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world. </p>
<p>"The developed countries move a lot of manufacturing industry into China," said Qin. "A lot of the things you wear, you use, you eat are produced in China. On the one hand, you shall increase the production in China, on the other hand you criticize China on the emission reduction issue.'' </p>
<p>Apologist edge aside, Burtynsky might agree with one of Qin's points. The depiction of toxic interdependence between developed and developing nations is what makes <i>Landscapes</i> such a powerful film -- and not a polemical one. Burtynsky interrogates the ways in which his critique of environmental destruction is only possible because of it. His tripod is made of metal, he muses, the film with silver, the car he uses to get from shoot to shoot runs on oil. </p>
<p>In keeping with that inward focus, Landscapes begins not with an external natural vista, but with an eight-minute tracking shot inside a Chinese factory. The camera pans past machinery, long rows of workers stooped over tables, on and on, a never-ending visual drone. Is this what progress looks like? Landscapes poses the question without ever openly asking it, or providing an answer. </p>
<p>Burtynsky began to focus on China after years of photographing "the largest industrial incursions by man" -- wastelands left by mines, quarries, oil fields, and refineries. He followed the products of these extractive industries to China, where they are processed into different products that are then shipped back out. China's role as a massive manufacturing hub makes it the perfect case study for the perils of the global economy. What toll, Bertynsky seems to ask, does pell-mell industrialization take on fragile human and environmental resources? </p>
<p>Burtynsky visits endless factories, and then a village devoted to recycling "e-waste," where computer parts are harvested, broken down, or burned, poisoning the water table and blanketing the village in smoke that can be smelled ten kilometers away. Landscapes trails Burtynsky to the Three Gorges dam site, the largest such project in the world. And then to Shanghai, China's beacon of progress, where long-time residents are thrown out to make room for gauche condos and housing developments. </p>
<p>Burtynsky's photos are unsettling in their beauty. Recycled material looks like slate-grey moon rock, a tangle of computer wires like silken yarn. Colors seem supersaturated -- a landscape so black it looks volcanic is seamed not by lava, but by a river the color of orange-highlighter ink. A mountain pool flares Star Trek green. The ugly condos of Shanghai resemble salt-crystal formations. The overall effect is either otherworldly or disruptive of scale -- Bertynsky makes our world alien. And it is, for these are all blighted landscapes we never see – or do not want to see. </p>
<p>Baichwal adds a delicate context to Bertynsky's work. Where the photographer often poses iconic figures in his frames -- a stooped grandma, a tiny worker shadowed by a great decaying ship -- Baichwal is interested in individuals' stories, those of factory workers and Shanghai nouveau riche. She fills in just enough to resize Bertynsky's work in a human frame. </p>
<p>The film is full of such subtle juxtapositions -- a super sci-fi model of urban development is contrasted with the countryside, martial rows of trees give way to an obscenely luxe private garden. When Bertynsky travels to the Three Gorges dam area, he captures pictures of incredible emotional complexity. Over one million people were displaced by the dam, and Bertynsky photographs the villagers dismantling their houses brick by brick. They're being paid to do so. It's a compelling vision -- he's framing fragmentation, memorializing decay. </p>
<p><i>Landscapes</i> doesn't fail to question its audience. In one masterful piece of editing, Baichwal fades from Bertynsky's set-up of a factory shot to the actual picture, hanging in a gallery. What does it mean for these images to be consumed by audiences that benefit from the subjects' toil? For them to be rendered such beautiful art? </p>
<p>Berytnsky, Baichwal and their crew are confronted at one factory by officials, who argue, "It's very dirty... I don't think it's a good day to make beautiful pictures. It's very gloomy here." But that is precisely the point. Beauty and gloom coexist in Bertynsky's pictures. And they operate on both aesthetic and activist levels because they don't push either viewer or subject into easy opposition with one another. </p>
<p>In one of the film's final shots, Baichwal's lens settles on a tiny shack in a barren, neon-lit landscape. The image looks a dark rendering of the sage hut that appears in many Chinese landscape paintings -- a picture of meditative solitude, of harmonious co-existence. Bertynsky's version reminds us that, despite the disproportionate environmental toll China and developing countries take, or are forced to take, we are all living in the same house, in the same decaying landscape together, and that no paradise manufactured can replace a paradise lost.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:23:20 +0000146431 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewShuttering the Siteshttps://prospect.org/article/shuttering-sites
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As Thai web surfers might tell you, living under a military government is no fun. Since April, Thai Internet users looking to YouTube for their favorite lip-sync performances, stupid-human tricks, or political-protest videos have been getting a real eyeful. Not the glorious heap of trash and treasure that the video-sharing site usually offers, but the "green screen" that the country's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) puts up when it blocks a site. Underneath a large logo of an eye, the Web site reads: "We're sorry, this website is inappropriate … If you have any feedback or wish to report any other inappropriate sites, please click on the eye above." </p>
<p>The naughty content that sparked the Ministry's ire was a video that covered a picture of widely revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej's face with graffiti and with images of feet, which Thais consider an impure part of the body. "It's a serious case of lèse-majesté," said MICT Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, and although YouTube's owner, Google, removed four of the 12 offending videos that cropped up, the site remains blocked in Thailand. Critics of the current government weren't convinced of the lèse-majesté justification, however, speculating that YouTube was blocked to prevent access to interviews in which former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, deposed in a coup last September, defended his time in office. </p>
<p>For the average Internet user, the green screen offered no explanation, but it sent a clear message from the military government. And with the passing of new cybercrime legislation in May, the government is turning the message into law. The Bill on Computer-Related Offenses (which awaits the king's likely assent) grants broad powers to MICT officials to record and seize computer data and personal user-identification information, and to block information it deems a threat to national security. Penalties include up to five years of imprisonment and fines up to 100,000 baht (around $3,000, the approximate average annual income in Thailand). </p>
<p>The cybercrime law is just one more strike against democracy in Thailand, according to media activists in Thailand and Human Rights Watch. "The Internet is the greatest attempt at participatory democracy that we've ever had," says long-term Thai resident CJ Hinke, founder of Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT). "And we've cut the pipe in Thailand." With its new cybercrime bill, its scuffles with YouTube and Google, and massive increases in blocked sites, Thailand seems to be emulating the "China model" of the Internet -- open to economic development, closed to free speech. This sort of censorship, accomplished with the collusion of international IT companies seeking emerging markets, could create a "virus of Internet repression," according to a new Amnesty International campaign on Internet censorship. </p>
<p>More locally, the cybercrime law -- the first law passed by the military government -- seems to bode ill for Thailand's political process. After the September coup, army officials reassured a worried public that they supported democracy and political reform, and would draft a new constitution and hold elections within a year's time. Since then, however, the Constitutional Court banned Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party, barring him and his 110 party officials from participating in politics for five years. That court ruling came after months of political censorship: Since the September coup, the government's blocking of Web sites went up more than 400 percent, and journalists working in TV, radio, and film report a marked increase in cuts and control, nearly all of it justified under lèse-majesté law, national-security concerns, and charges of offending Buddhism. Thailand has dropped to No. 127 out of 194 countries in the Freedom House's press-freedom rankings, compared to No. 29 in 2000. "We thought that censorship was bad during the Thaksin period, but the [new government] is attacking press freedoms in a way Thaksin never did," said Supinya Klangnarong, a media-reform advocate and co-organizer of Freedom Against Censorship Thailand. </p>
<p>As Supinya noted, pre-coup Thailand wasn't a lost Eden of press freedom. Dubbed the "Berlusconi of Bangkok," Thaksin swept elections in 2001 and 2005 on media-savvy campaigns. In 2000 Thaksin's family's company, Shincorp, purchased a controlling share in the country's only independent TV channel -- the perfect perch from which to peddle his CEO image, which he cleverly joined with populist policies for the poor, including village development plans and a universal health-care policy. Thaksin and his business allies also threatened to yank their private advertising from publications that questioned his policies, pulled strings to remove recalcitrant editors and writers, and, most notoriously, filed a 400-million baht ($11.7 million) lawsuit against media advocate Supinya after she stated that the business interests of Thaksin's family benefited from his government policies. (Supinya was acquitted after a two-year battle in the courts.) </p>
<p>Thaksin's policies and his business jockeying alienated an already suspicious upper class, and he was rumored to have offended the monarchy with his arrogance and his successful wooing of Thailand's rural poor -- traditionally the king's most loyal base. So by the time the prime minister sold his family's $1.9 billion telecom business to the Singapore government's investment arm, the conditions were ripe for revolt. Clad in the yellow shirts affiliated with the Thai monarch, critics held protest after protest beseeching the king to remove Thaksin. They called themselves the People's Alliance for Democracy, seemingly oblivious to the irony of their name, given that their ad hoc coalition was composed largely of Bangkok intelligentsia asking a monarch to depose a democratically elected leader. Anti-Thaksin videos and satirical Chinese political plays flourished, and restaurants all over town were running out of gourd-leaf stir-fry -- ordering "<i>fahk maew</i>" allowed diners to enjoy a tasty dish and swear in English at the prime minister, often called "Maew," a derogatory ethnic slur for the Hmong people who live near Thaksin's Chiang Mai hometown. </p>
<p>The tanks rolled into Bangkok on September 19, 2006, although the coup turned out to be a bloodless one. A day after the Royal Thai Army seized the capital, junta leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin announced that the king had recognized him as the head of the interim Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy. The royal imprimatur brought anti-Thaksin hordes to the streets to offer food to the soldiers; tourists posed by tanks decorated with royal yellow ribbon. Underneath the Disneyland veneer, however, was something darker -- the junta had declared martial law, suspended the constitution, and disbanded the Parliament and the Cabinet. </p>
<p>The coup government had branded itself as a cure to Thaksin's corruption, immorality, and irreverence to the king, and its members took their watchdog job seriously. Armed troops were stationed in TV and radio stations. Those media outlets that were not occupied, like 300 community–radio stations in Thaksin strongholds in the North, were told to suspend broadcasts entirely. International media did not escape the Council's chokehold: Four days after the coup, the interim government declared it would "urgently retaliate against foreign reporters whose coverage has been deemed insulting to the monarchy." </p>
<p>Foreigners weren't the only ones asking questions about the coup. In the hours after Thaksin's overthrow, the message boards at the daily independent Web newspaper <i>Prachatai</i> lit up with questions concerning the possible connection between the king and the coup, according to editor Chuwat Rerksirisuk. "Thai society has not been open about these sorts of questions at all," said Chuwat. "The media … censors itself, and doesn't really include the opinions of the opposition." </p>
<p>Within a few months, officials from the national police forces, the military, and the MICT began to call <i>Prachatai</i> offices suggesting that the organization censor itself or face a shutdown. <i>Prachatai</i> always had a policy of deleting ad hominem attacks, including those on the monarch, says Chuwat. But the publication refuses to censor other comments and faces escalating official pressure. Despite this, Chuwat is holding firm. </p>
<p>Other sites haven't been so resistant or so lucky. According to FACT's analysis of the MICT's secret block list, 11,329 Web sites are blocked in the country, and 90 new Web sites were blocked in May -- each of them political in nature. Minister Sittichai denies the rampant censorship: To the press, he declares he hasn't blocked more than 30, all of them pornographic, despite clear evidence to the contrary. </p>
<p>Some of the Web sites have fought back. After the staff of Midnight University, an alternative educational center based in the northern city of Chiang Mai, held a demonstration against the coup government, their Web site was blocked on September 29, cutting off thousands of articles and discussions boards. The staff members launched a media blitz, contacting Thai and international journalists and academics. As a result, said rector Somkiat Tangnamo, they succeeded in wresting an order from the Administrative Court to unblock the Web site. </p>
<p>Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand's most prominent filmmaker, is also refusing to stand down. The film-censorship committee decreed that the Cannes–award winning director's <i>Syndromes and a Century</i> needed four cuts -- scenes including a monk playing a guitar, a doctor drinking on the job, a doctor and his girlfriend kissing in the hospital, and a monk playing with a remote-controlled toy. After Apichatpong declined to cut his film, the censorship committee refused to return the work. "The censorship committee doesn't see films as personal art or a reflection of reality. They think of it as … a tourist brochure or propaganda," said Apichatpong. The filmmaker is at a stalemate with the censors -- his film undistributed but uncut. But international media attention and pressure around his case is growing every day. </p>
<p>Cases like Apichatpong's are as rare as self-censorship has become epidemic. This is not surprising in light of ever-expanding government intrusion. Even as they added to their Web-site block list, the generals sent out messages to millions of cell-phone users the weekend after the Constitutional Court banned Thaksin's party, advising them to "exercise your judgment about whether to attend anti-government protests." The eye on the green screen, it appears, sees far beyond the Web.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:00:55 +0000146393 at https://prospect.orgNoy ThrupkaewPro Conhttps://prospect.org/article/pro-con
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>With the preposterous, superfluous, and highly entertaining Ocean's Thirteen, Steven Soderbergh delivers a master-class on the summer sequel -- keep it slick, make fun of yourself, and don't spit in the audience's eye.</p>
<p>Yoo hoo, <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=spidey_senseless">Sam Raimi</a>? Should have taken some cues from Soderbergh. </p>
<p><i>Ocean's Thirteen</i> is the third film to lavish attention on a rainbow coalition of robbers. The first was an energetic remake of a 1960 Rat Pack film and for all its polish, it had the feel of an impromptu romp. Unfortunately, <i>Ocean's Twelve</i> tipped the balance of the first -- its insubstantiality, its borderline smugness -- into self-satisfaction. Case in point: a farcical subplot in which Julia Roberts (as head gangster Danny Ocean's wife) impersonated... Julia Roberts. </p>
<p>Luckily, <i>Thirteen</i> has recovered the first's slouchy insouciance, along with its sense of humor. The first thing <i>Thirteen</i> does right is mock its threequel-itis. Plot as hyperbole? Winking self-referentiality? A bloated cast of characters? Thirteen's got it all, and manages to be both knowing and sincere in its sheer unbelievability. </p>
<p> "You're analog in a digital world," an accomplice tells Ocean (an almost criminally handsome George Clooney). Ocean flinches -- he knows it's true. But it's also what makes this film tick -- <i>Thirteen</i> marries a creaky old revenge premise to glossy good looks. This time, Ocean and his motley crew are out for Willy Bank (Al Pacino), a tacky, Trump-y hotel developer who has swindled Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), the boys' beloved mentor, out of his portion of the profits in a new hotel, and into a cardiac event. </p>
<p>Exposition is rendered at the speed of light -- the swindle's reveal is done so quickly that all one can remember is Pacino's teeth, clacking like castanets. That and the actor's terrifying impersonation of a piece of fine leather luggage -- or perhaps he's a <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166982/">refugee from Sunset Tan</a>? My God, did he henna his <i>whole face</i>? </p>
<p>Soderbergh mercifully cuts to the boys, each with personalities that fit together like cogs in a machine. Clooney is the unflappably suave captain, Rusty (Brad Pitt) his strategically minded second-in-command. Each has his singular shtick, but there are so damn many of them that the joke doesn't get old -- plus there is the woolly plot to get through. The boys decide to bankrupt Bank's new casino-hotel on opening night by rigging all the games, sabotaging a key hotel reviewers' visit, stealing some jewels. Each strand involves idiotic shenanigans worthy of a Bond film. Ocean's gang needs to contend with a security system powered by artificial intelligence, so they decide to trigger an earthquake with a giant drill. The poor hotel reviewer is poisoned by an old dumpling, massacred by bedbugs, beset upon by more plagues than Job. Only Bank and his equally leathery assistant (Ellen Barkin looking, well, like a Birkin bag) have access to the jewels? Nothing that Matt Damon, armed with an aphrodisiac patch and a giant prosthetic shnozz, can't fix. </p>
<p>Like the villains' fiercely tanned wattles, the plot is nothing but a practical joke, an elaborate set-up for Soderbergh's ensuing sleight of hand. Las Vegas is the perfect medium for the director's obsession with surfaces, hocus-pocus, with the lies and illusions of film itself. His Las Vegas is no lost city -- there's no reek of cigarette butts, of despair in polyester pants, of the buffet warmed over and mingling with margaritas by the yard. Every shot is burnished -- gold, red, astral blues -- clanging with color, with that camera swooping through. This Vegas is a sweet, seductive song, a benevolent universe about to pay off, presided over by pranksters with hearts of gold and a touch to match. </p>
<p>Soderbergh lets a few darker things flit through -- but even those have the quality of a throw-away joke. Two of the 13 infiltrate a dice-making factory in Mexico and foment a tiny revolution -- it's an ironic and telling twist that the workers' pay raise is the cheapest part of the operation. Ocean is caught bawling while watching Oprah, his gang muffles their anxiety over Reuben's illness by launching into Operation Schadenfreude, the thoroughly punked reviewer gets a lucrative apology. This is guy-style do-goodism -- genuinely felt, but delivered like a gag. </p>
<p><i>Thirteen</i> is entirely honest about its contrivances -- with its full-tilt, nonsensical plot, its characters that are punch-lines rather than personalities, and its unapologetically gorgeous cinematography, it manages to show its hand and trick us at the same time. Although Soderbergh would love to be a master of "art" -- witness the lugubrious <i>Solaris</i> remake, the Dogma-esque <i>Bubble</i> -- he is true prophet of artifice. It's a generous talent, to stage a play with the backstage on show. In the end, it's what keeps us wrapped up in this perverse paradise -- conned by charm, and by our own happy complicity. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 08 Jun 2007 21:40:53 +0000146361 at https://prospect.orgNoy Thrupkaew